Willige Staaten müssen handeln, um die internationale Rechtsordnung zu retten, warnt Spitzenwissenschaftler | Yale-Professor sagt, Kriege in der Ukraine und im Gazastreifen und Drohungen von Donald Trump drohen den „totalen Zusammenbruch“ des globalen Gerichtssystems
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/nov/11/willing-states-must-act-to-save-international-legal-order-warns-top-academic
4 Kommentare
submission statement:
The current American government has been actively working to de-legitimize the international institutions and agreements that form the basis of much of the international cooperation we see around trade, human rights, human migration, the environment, and the like. Like-minded states should, in the opinion of this professor, come together to reinforce the integrity of these institutions, and fight against the erosion of some of the foundational elements of the international systems such as the prohibition on forceful conquest.
edit: slow typing during edit.
Some of the key issues from the article:
>Oona Hathaway, the president-elect of the American Society of International Law and a former Pentagon legal adviser, said the core of the postwar global order – the prohibition on taking land by force – was under unprecedented challenge in a “scary moment” for the world.
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>The Yale Law School professor cited the willingness of the US government to delegitimise institutions that Washington helped create, including the international court of justice (ICJ).
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>Her intervention comes when the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts have generated global interest in international law possibly not seen since the Nuremberg trials after the second world war.
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>“There is an increased awareness that this is a really scary moment, but what will it take for people to put their differences aside and come up with something new and radical?” she said while on a visit to the UK to deliver two lectures. “I hope it does not take total collapse, but it might. I don’t know. We will see.”
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>Hathaway said the protection of civilians under international humanitarian law was being “eroded to the point of threatening to lose all meaning” and said a crisis of authority was looming at the ICJ. Its workload is growing, with more states seeking its opinion, but compliance with its rulings has fallen from 80% to closer to 50%. Hathaway said a delegitimised court would “put the entire system at risk”.
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>She said: “We are not seeing a global response to the US willingness to flout international law. It is probably time to start thinking about that.”
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>With the UN security council unable to enforce ICJ rulings, she proposed novel measures to allow nation states to seek compliance with court orders.
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>These include suspending states from UN committees, withdrawing speaking rights or even suspension from the general assembly – a punishment meted out to South Africa for refusing to comply with an ICJ order to end its occupation of Namibia in 1974.
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>Hathaway suggested that the remit of the new Hague Group formed to enforce ICJ judgments against Israel could be expanded to cover all ICJ rulings, with non-compliance seen as a matter for all states. “The idea of a group of states getting together with the aim of using their collective power to support ICJ and international criminal court decisions is a good one,” she said.
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>Her central contention is that the great achievement of international law emerging from the interwar years, and coming to fruition in the 1945 UN charter, was the prohibition of the use of force for conquest, changing a centuries-old view of the legitimacy of state violence. But this is now threatened by challenges including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing’s seizure of contested land in the South China Sea and Donald Trump’s threats to invade Greenland.
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>She called prohibition of forceful conquest the “foundational norm” of the international legal system, the “baseline norm on which the rest of the international legal system sits”.
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>…
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>Hathaway admitted international law could seem “remote, esoteric, formal and complicated” but stressed prohibition on the use of force by states had made the world much more peaceful.
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>“It is not always totally apparent to people that they should care about what we do and why it matters,” she added. “We tend to notice international law only when it is failing so we need to try to explain its impact … otherwise people may not realise what they have until they lose it.”
The loss of broad consensus on international laws will lead to further complications in relations between nations and blocs, and serve to fragment the world back into colonial spheres of influence. This will also serve to destabilize current relationships and increase the types and number of conflicts globally. Likely the current powers such as Russia, India, the United States, and China, whose influences might be unstable are looking to fragment the system in order to solidify their own positions towards their own ends.
I think it’s already dead, to be honest:
– Europe lacks the unity and the interest to promote international law with any gusto.
– America always had unilateralist tendencies, and the Trump administration outright hates so-called “globalism”.
– African states have been persuaded that human rights and international law are neo-colonialism.
– Latin America and ASEAN are feckless to handle crises in their own regions.
– Russia and China treat international law just like their domestic laws: legitimizing theater that’s nice to have, but always takes a back seat to politics.
The brutal truth is that any legal system is only as good as the ability to enforce it. This has always been the Achilles heel of international law (the UN Security Council was deliberately designed to make enforcement difficult). But interventionism is so discredited that any will to enforce the law has now completely evaporated.
Wete they ever „alive“?