Available in Russian
Author: Vladislav Donakanyan
DOI: 10.21128/2226-2059-2023-4-103-126
Keywords: International Court of Justice; individual (separate) opinions of judges; legitimacy of decisions of international courts; interpretation of court judgments; subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law
The system of modern international justice has a firmly rooted norm according to which judges have the right to attach their individual opinion to a judicial act, in which they can express solidarity with the position of the majority, or provide an alternative point of view. Individual opinions of judges do not often become the subject of scientific discussions, but the few existing works show that international lawyers assess this phenomenon ambiguously. The article attempts to comprehensively analyze this phenomenon on the example of the practice of the International Court of Justice. The paper critically examined the arguments of opponents of the institute of individual opinions, namely their impact on the legitimacy of decisions and independence of judges. The author also considered approaches to determining the legal nature of individual opinions of judges as parts of judicial decisions and teachings of the most highly qualified publicists in the field of public law. The study has led to the conclusion that the special features of judges’ opinions do not allow to classify them into any of these legal categories. The main focus of the paper was on the practical significance of the opinions of the judges of the International Court of Justice. Thus, in the article it was demonstrated on the example of a number of judicial decisions that such opinions allow to clarify the substantive content of judicial acts. The paper finds that the judicial opinions attached to a judgment help to strengthen the legal reasoning of the judgments themselves (due to the parallel nature of their drafting) and provide valuable material for the academic community. At the same time, the author does not share the position that individual judges’ opinions can be qualified as “agents” of the progressive development of international law.
About the author: Vladislav Donakanyan – Master of Law (Moscow State Institute of International Relations), Legal Practitioner, Moscow, Russia.
Citation: Donakanyan V. (2023) Nezrimaya chast’ pazla: rol’ individual’nykh mneniy sudey v praktike Mezhdunarodnogo Suda OON [The invisible piece of the puzzle: the role of individual opinions of judges in the practice of the International Court of Justice]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, no. 13, no. 4, pp. 103–126. (In Russian).
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