International Law: How Does It Actually Work in Practice?

Last week, we looked at the complex subject of human rights at both the conceptual and practical levels. By asking where human rights come from and assessing the actual utility of international law in promoting such rights, our discussions highlighted their contested nature. This week, we would like to build on these preliminary efforts and consider how international law is actually being applied in today’s world. To kick things off, today we would like to look at this basic topic in a prismatic way.

In our first video, Sir Christopher Greenwood considers how (and whether) applying international law can indeed facilitate change throughout the international system. Greenwood’s overarching answer is a familiar “yes,” but he reminds us that political will is absolutely crucial if one wants to develop effective mechanisms for the implementation of international law, as is political consensus, given the lack of enforcement tools needed to ensure state compliance.

Shifting the prism a bit, our second video then uses the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as a backdrop to considering some of the challenges of applying international law to security-related problems. As Professor Richard Falk notes, at the heart of this problem is what powerful states actually do, to include pursuing unilateral courses of action, and what the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) permits. (Let us not forget, Michael Wood reminds us, that from the perspective of international law, the UNSC external pageremainscall_made “the only body within the international legal system that can make lawful measures to uphold international peace and security that would otherwise violate the law.” That it does not have the mechanisms in place to impose its will is, of course, the stuff of legend.)

The final turn of our prism features yet another video presentation. In it, lawyer and advisor to the World Conservation Union Kristina Gjerde looks at the difficulties of applying international law to the high seas. Indeed, are the world’s oceans a legally-binding global commons, or are they actually managed by (and for) those who have the resources to go out and exploit them? If we do share a collective sense of responsibility to protect at least some aspects of the global commons, do we not confront, yet again, a familiar problem – i.e., verifying state compliance with international law on the high seas? Like Greenwood and Falk, Gjerde grapples with the inherent problems of applying legal norms in a semi-legal world, at least as seen from the perspective of the legally-minded.

While the above three turns of the prism may remind us that the actual application of international law is a mottled and difficult thing, they nevertheless highlight some common truths. Our three speakers remind us, for example, that national-level laws cannot be simply transferred to international structures. And while most states willingly comply with the internationally-mandated rules and obligations they signed up to, the enforcement problem continues to loom large. This, in turn, seems to confirm that Sir Christopher Greenwood is indeed right – the application of international law, at least in today’s world, works only to the extent that the political will and consensus needed to ensure genuine adherence and compliance are actually in place.