Can International Courts Provide Effective Enforcement Of International Legal Instruments - Essay Example

Day, Month, YearEffectiveness of International Courts in Providing Effective Enforcement of International Legal InstrumentsSince world war 11, there has been a significant increase in the number of international legal instruments including agreements, treaties, inter governmental organizations among others (Allot 1999). With the rise in such relations, the desire to avoid conflict and provide arbitration mechanism where conflicts occur and the rise in significance of the United Nations and international law, has made development of a number of dispute resolution mechanism crucial to ensure that disputes based on such relations among other conflicts are adequately addressed.

Among the devices that have been used include international courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU), International Criminal Court (ICC), International Court of Justice (ICJ) and so on. However, a major challenge facing the international courts is the issue of providing effective enforcements and encouraging states to comply with international legal instruments as arbitrated through declarations and judgments made by the courts and tribunals.

This paper argues that although it is difficult to provide effective enforcement of international legal instruments due to various reasons such as sovereignty of states, impartiality of courts, conflict with domestic constitutions, and dependence on state cooperation recent cases in ICC provide a possible potential to providing effective enforcement of some aspects of international laws.The paper thus aims to determine whether international courts can provide effective enforcement of various international legal instruments.

The paper will first identify the elements of international law before highlighting the crucial factors that are impediments to effective enforcement of international legal instruments. The paper will also identify various theories that are used to explain international relations and why international courts have not been effective in implementing and enforcing international legal instruments. The paper will thus determine the challenges that are faced by the international courts . The paper will further identify two case studies to give a glimpse of the effectiveness and failures of the international court in the case of ICJ.

One case will identify a situation where an international court, in this case ICC was effective. However, the paper will conclude by asserting that despite efforts towards ensuring that the various international courts are effective in enforcement of international legal instruments, such efforts are impeded not only by the legal elements of the law itself but also due to other factors such as finances, sovereignty of states, resistance and reliance on states to achieve enforcement.International law like any other forms of law is an effort by the human society towards self –constitution.

Similar to other laws, International law involves a set of legal relations, which the society uses to accomplish social conditioning and to serve the common interest of the society (Berderman 2008). The social function of law in international community is thus evidently similar to other forms of law, only that it represents the larger society, namely the entire human race. Law as a byproduct of social process, not only organizes the making of the law, but also its application. International law as evidenced in establishing the international criminal courts establish that there are crimes that are inherently against the whole society.

Such crimes include genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on. This concept of crimes that are universal stems from the idealism theory. The theory holds that in order to build international norms the selfish impulses of individuals can be debased to where it would be possible to foster international peace, cooperation, prosperity and avoid wars since they are idealistically not beneficial to the losers nor winners. By appealing to higher ideals of a nations psyche, the nations may be forced to aid in enforcement of international courts judgments as members of the international community.

One of the tools that are used to implement and enforce international legal instruments in international law is through use of International courts. Whereas recent developments in the larger society reflect an awareness of the necessity for effective international law, and especially in the ability of the international courts to enforce international legal instruments, evidence from various case studies suggest that various impediments and problems must be overcome before the society gets a fully functional international legal system.