Today we celebrate the inauguration 70 years ago of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and reflect upon its growing contribution to stronger implementation of international human rights and humanitarian law throughout the globe.
It was 70 years ago today, on 
Today we celebrate the inauguration 70 years ago of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and reflect upon its growing contribution to stronger implementation of international human rights and humanitarian law throughout the globe.
It was 70 years ago today, on 18 April 1946, that the League of Nations adopted a resolution terminating its judicial arm – the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) – to make way for the establishment of the International Court of Justice within the framework of the newly established United Nations Organization, successor to the League. The day before, Professor K.H. Bailey of Australia, serving as the League’s advisor on this transition, underlined that: “Just as the dissolution of the League of Nations follows upon the establishment of the United Nations, so the dissolution of the Permanent Court of International Justice follows upon the establishment by the United Nations of a new International Court of Justice”. He observed that: “Men, conscious that they are, after all, mortal, may, when they hear the word ‘dissolution’, think that the Permanent Court is dead. In substance, the contrary is the truth”. Legally, the ICJ was a new institution, but functionally, its Statute, procedures and jurisprudence from the start borrowed heavily from and continue to be very much inspired by the PCIJ’s rich legacy.
It has to be said that since 1946, the ICJ’s contribution to human rights promotion and protection was scarcely noticeable, but this changed dramatically over the last decade or so with a series of rulings where the Court emphasized international human rights and humanitarian law and principles.
So why has the ICJ’s contribution to human rights and humanitarian law picked up only recently?
First and foremost, the ICJ was never intended to function as a human rights court nor was it ever structured as one. Only States can bring contentious cases to it, in contrast to human rights venues, such as the European Court of Human Rights or Inter-American Court of Human Rights to which individuals can and do bring allegations of human rights violations against Governments. Even where a State brings a case, as Greece did in 1924 in Mavrommatis, to protect one of its nationals’ rights against encroachment by Great Britain, the PCIJ made clear that the “State is in reality asserting its own rights – its right to ensure, in the person of its subjects, respect for the rules of international law”, not that individuals enjoyed any direct legal standing before the Court.
Second, the Court’s slow recognition of human rights in the 1950s and 1960s can be explained partly by the fact that international human rights law itself did not exist prior to 1945, except for international labour law which is anchored in the post-World War I establishment of the International Labour Organization and international minority rights protection based on certain post-World War I peace treaties. In 1945, the UN Charter included human rights promotion among the Organization’s main purposes in Article 1(3), and in Articles 55 and 56, the Charter obliges member States to take joint and separate action in cooperation with the Organization to promote human rights, thus elevating human rights to a matter of international legal concern. Yet it still took many years from the time of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948, and adoption of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide the day before, for the international community to build up the corpus of international human rights law as we recognize it today. During the 1950s and 1960s, the ICJ could hardly apply international human rights law that was still at a very early stage of normative development.
Third, the ICJ’s weak recognit