> This has to be the most comprehensive and informative reply to any question I've posed on the Internet in the last 30 years of being online. Thank you!
Law has always been a passion of mine, and international law in particular. I even applied for law school once but wasn’t accepted. If I tried again, applied to more schools, I probably would have been accepted by one of them eventually, but I took it as a message from the great beyond that it wasn’t meant to be. Still, if one believes in parallel universes, I reckon there must be one out there in which right now I’m a lawyer instead of a software engineer
> What powers would the ICJ have to punish individual actors at fault in a situation like this? Or to force an injunction? (outside of monetary damages which does you no good if you're dead)
The ICJ has very broad powers to order states to do things. The only real limit is its own judgement about what is legal and what is prudent-if it starts ordering things which the international community views as unreasonable, it could greatly harm its own reputation, and I think its judges are aware of that risk and keep it in mind when making decisions.
However, while the ICJ can order states to do things, it has no actual power to compel them to obey its orders. Under the UN Charter, that’s the job of the Security Council. In theory, if a state violates an ICJ order, the Security Council can order military action to enforce it. In practice, that obviously doesn’t work when one of the P5 is the respondent, since they aren’t going to vote for military action against themselves. And even if the respondent is some friendless pariah country, other states might not view enforcing an ICJ order as worth going to war over.
An unenforceable order isn’t entirely worthless though. Obviously it can have negative diplomatic and political consequences for the state concerned, it can harm their reputation in the court of international public opinion. And a case can be valuable for establishing legal precedent. The LaGrand case actually was important in that the ICJ for the first time ruled that its provisional measures (basically a preliminary injunction) were legally binding. This was unclear because the wording of the English text of the Statute of the ICJ suggests they are not but the French text suggests they are, and both the English and French are equally authoritative. Faced with that contradiction, the ICJ decided in this case to follow the French over the English.
Law has always been a passion of mine, and international law in particular. I even applied for law school once but wasn’t accepted. If I tried again, applied to more schools, I probably would have been accepted by one of them eventually, but I took it as a message from the great beyond that it wasn’t meant to be. Still, if one believes in parallel universes, I reckon there must be one out there in which right now I’m a lawyer instead of a software engineer
> What powers would the ICJ have to punish individual actors at fault in a situation like this? Or to force an injunction? (outside of monetary damages which does you no good if you're dead)
The ICJ has very broad powers to order states to do things. The only real limit is its own judgement about what is legal and what is prudent-if it starts ordering things which the international community views as unreasonable, it could greatly harm its own reputation, and I think its judges are aware of that risk and keep it in mind when making decisions.
However, while the ICJ can order states to do things, it has no actual power to compel them to obey its orders. Under the UN Charter, that’s the job of the Security Council. In theory, if a state violates an ICJ order, the Security Council can order military action to enforce it. In practice, that obviously doesn’t work when one of the P5 is the respondent, since they aren’t going to vote for military action against themselves. And even if the respondent is some friendless pariah country, other states might not view enforcing an ICJ order as worth going to war over.
An unenforceable order isn’t entirely worthless though. Obviously it can have negative diplomatic and political consequences for the state concerned, it can harm their reputation in the court of international public opinion. And a case can be valuable for establishing legal precedent. The LaGrand case actually was important in that the ICJ for the first time ruled that its provisional measures (basically a preliminary injunction) were legally binding. This was unclear because the wording of the English text of the Statute of the ICJ suggests they are not but the French text suggests they are, and both the English and French are equally authoritative. Faced with that contradiction, the ICJ decided in this case to follow the French over the English.