Available in Russian
Author: Alexander Nurik
DOI: 10.21128/2226-2059-2023-4-58-86
Keywords: Permanent Court of Arbitration; Permanent Court of International Justice; International Court of Justice; International Labor Organization; right to strike; international labor standards; global framework agreements
The article researches the activities of supranational judicial bodies claiming global jurisdiction in relation to their decisions on various labour issues. The focus of the article is the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the first global judicial body continuing to operate to this day; even more so the Permanent Court of International Justice, whose decisions played an important role in the protection and extension of the competence of the International Labour Organization (ILO); and finally the latter Court’s successor – the International Court of Justice, for which the international labour movement currently has high expectations in terms of the legal protection of the right to strike. In the case of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the article deals with two cases concerning claims by trade unions against violations of the Global Framework Agreement – probably the only two cases in the Court’s labour practice to date. Advisory opinions of the Permanent Court of International Justice concerning various aspects of the work of the ILO and the acts it adopts, as well as their impact on the ILO, are then reviewed. Finally, the labour practice of the International Court of Justice is reviewed. Special attention is paid to trade unions’ initiative to refer the “dispute on the right to strike” to the International Court of Justice, with support by the Governing Body of the International Labour Office. One of the main topics addressed in the article is the courts’ practices regarding the participation of international organizations – especially international trade union associations – in court proceedings involving advisory opinions. Studying the practices of the “global” judiciary as to labour issues allows tracing of both the development of the judiciary itself and the procedures applied by them as well as the development of the “world of work”. The latter includes the development of the ILO and the system of international labour standards and also the development of global legal instruments which are at the disposal of the international trade union movement.
About the author: Alexander Nurik – Director of the Center for Social and Labour Rights (CSLR), Moscow, Russia.
Citation: Nurik А. (2023) Mezhdunarodnye sudy i sfera truda: istoriya i perspektivy [International courts and the world of work: history and prospects]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 58–86. (In Russian).
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