POLITICS-UN: World Court Complains It Lacking Resources

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 22 1998 (IPS) - The International Court of Justice (ICJ) says the U.N. General Assembly is ignoring pleas for increased resources – while providing more funds and staff to the newly created war crimes tribunals.

In a written statement the Court – the UN’s main judicial body which is based in the Hague – accuses the General Assembly of discrimination. It acknowledges that the 185-member body is operating under great financial constraints but, nonetheless it has “found the means to support other judicial bodies” in the U.N. system.

The Court observes that while the Assembly grudgingly allocated 11 million dollars for the ICJ’s annual operating costs, the 1997 budget of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, also in the Hague, stands at 70 million dollars.

In its submission to the Assembly, the ICJ says it is aware that the Yugoslav tribunal has certain needs which the World Court itself does not have – for example, investigators in the field, or witness protection programmes.

“But the Court does need that which is essential for every judicial body to function. And even as regards this common element, the Court and the Tribunal do not receive comparable treatment,”it adds.

Established in 1946, the ICJ is one of six principal organs of the United Nations – the others being the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and the Secretariat. As the UN’s premier judicial organ, its independence and autonomy are recognised by the U.N. Charter.

The Yugoslav tribunal based in the Hague was created in May 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for having committed or ordered serious violations of humanitarian law. In November 1994, the Security Council created a similar tribunal, based in Tanzania, to prosecute those who were responsible for genocide in Rwanda.

The General Assembly recently adopted budgetary provisions for the Yugoslav tribunal granting it additional permanent posts, including 22 legal personnel, to provide clerks for each judge (with the rest serving in the Registry). “The judges of the International Court have no such legal clerks at all,” the ICJ complains.

The Court says that its current budget is a sum not much larger, in real terms, than when the Court had little work in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the ICJ has been struggling to deal with a very heavy docket of cases with a relatively modest increase in resources. The initial increase in resources in those years has been prejudiced by the later cuts which have been imposed on the Court, it said.

As part of an austerity drive and overall budgetary cuts in the economically-ailing U.N. system, the Court complied with a mandated reduction of some 885,600 dollars in 1996-1997. This resulted in a cut of more than 50 percent for external printing purposes.

The truth is that in failing to provide the necessary resources, the Assembly is diminishing the importance it attaches to the peaceful resolution of international disputes through law, the ICJ warns.

Publication of the pleadings of cases has, since 1983, been sporadic; and there has been no publication of pleadings received since 1990. “If the work of the Court is not widely accessible, its contribution to the prevention of conflicts and the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot be attained,” the ICJ says.

The Court was granted some expansion in the size of the permanent staff of the Registry, from the beginning of the 1980s until the early 1990s. “However, the growth in the Court’s work has been such that the increase has turned out to be insufficient,” it says.

The Court also says that the workload of its members of the staff, in real terms, has “relentlessly increased.” As a result, the obligations of the Court to fulfil its functions has meant that the Registry is “sometimes being asked to perform tasks that are quite simply physically impossible under the present staffing and budgetary regime.”

Since 1964, the Court has had to deal with 76 disputes between states, and 22 requests for advisory opinions. Whereas in the 1970s, the Court characteristically had one or two cases at a time on its docket, from the early 1980s there has been a marked increase in recourse to the Court.

Throughout the 1990s, the figures have been relatively large, standing at nine in 1990, 12 in 1991, 13 in 1992-1995, 12 in 1996 and nine in 1997. Currently, there are ten cases pending.

Addressing the General Assembly last year, ICJ President Stephen Schwebel said: “As the principal judicial organ of the United Nations whose budget is entirely funded by it, the Court has suffered, as the United Nations has itself suffered, from financial deprivation.”

The Court’s annual budget of 11 million dollars is “a minute and diminishing proportion” of the U.N.’s total budget of 1.2 billion dollars annually, he said.

At a time when the international community has launched two new war crimes tribunals – and is also in the process of creating an International Criminal Court – “it needs to fund adequately the supreme judicial organ of the international community.”

While he concedes that Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the U.N.’s administrative and budgetary committees are trying to mitigate the problem, the financial difficulties facing the Court “remain severe.”

The situation has been made worse by the fact that the judges of the Court, unlike other international courts and some national courts, have no clerks, no internes and little personal legal assistance, he said.

The Court consists of 15 judges elected by the General Assembly and the Security Council sitting independently of each other. The judges serve nine-year terms as independent magistrates and do not represent their governments.