Problems of International Law

I recently finished my last final exam for this semester of University. The course, as you can guess from the title of this entry, was "International Law". My professor had one of the essay questions as a scenario whereby I was a third-party arbitrator from the International Court of Justice asked to resolve a territorial dispute between France and Britain. The object of the dispute: a fictitious island named "Sarkensy" located in the English Channel and suspected of having oil and ore deposits.

Being a cheeky fellow, the professor decided to throw in an added hitch to the case. The width of the English Channel, at the point where Sarkensy would be located, was 60 nautical miles. Conveniently, the Geneva Convention of the High Seas stipulates that the territorial waters of coastal states extend out 30 nautical miles from the shore line. So Sarkensy was located directly halfway between France and Britain and the conditions of my arbitration was that I not split the island between the two states. There had to be a clear and decisive winner to the case with no "happy endings" like the ICJ telling the two countries to suck it up and share the island.

The arguments offered by the two states in favour of their claims to title over the island and its surrounding waters were what interested me the most as were the conditions under which a state could claim such title. International Law, when it comes to these sorts of issues, is highly undemocratic. No one was asking the people living on Sarkensy which state they would rather be a part of. There was no question of whether the people of Sarkensy thought themselves French or British or simply just Human. Instead, the arguments being made were how many times and with what degree of frequency the two states exerted their sovereign jurisdiction over the island. France sent a government official to visit the island in 1930. But the British sent an official to visit in 1931. France prosecuted a company for some environmental law infringement on the island in 1998 but Britain prosecuted British nationals for crimes committed on the island in 1889, 1902, 1929 and 1956. Britain placed troops on the island during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

All of this went on for two pages. But there was no mention of the people actually living on the island and whether they flew French flags or British flags- or both. It was a bit of a disturbing thought that law has become a bit disfigured during its transition from governing the lives of people on the local and national levels to the international level. It has become so caught up in its rules of fairness and balance that it has entirely become detached and distracted from the welfare of the people the law is intended to protect.

That leads to the question of exactly who international law is meant to benefit, who it is intended to protect. For the longest time, I had been under the impression that the law was meant to protect the lives of all- that everyone was equal before the law. An idealistic belief bound to natural law theory, I know. But it was what I believed: that law was bound at the hip to justice. Law and justice were one and the same. One could not exist without the other. But international law and the new world order following the Cold War further cements that the two can exist separately and do. The law, at least on the world level, cares nothing for the lives of the people on that fictional island in the English Channel just like it could care less about the lives of the people in Darfur- just like it is toothless to stop the Americans from waging illegal wars with impunity anywhere in the world they see fit.

Kofi Annan perhaps said it best during his final speech as Secretary-General of the United Nations. We need an authority with the power to have authority over the states of the world. This might startle some but consider the federations of the world. In Canada, a system of checks-and-balances exist so that no single level of government can abuse its power. If the federal Government of Canada abuses its authority and powers, the provincial governments can hold it accountable and force it to change its ways through dozens of mediums. The same could be true of a limited federation between all of the 192 member states of the United Nations. It could work and would do so rather well. It's working in the European Union. It could work in the African Union if powerful member states of that intergovernmental organization like Nigeria were to step up to the plate and carry their weight in enforcing the judgements and decisions of the AU. And it's worked in the dozens upon dozens of federations in the world that include such successful countries as Canada, the United States of America, Germany, India- the list goes on.

The problem is that it won't happen. The Americans would never give up an ounce of national sovereignty unless they thought they could win it back- along with a little chunk of the sovereignty of other states within the same organization. Just look at the farce of the Organization of American States. The plan was to cow the countries of Latin America and Canada into a neo-imperial arrangement with America as the core and the rest of the two continents of North and South America as the economic periphery- dependent on American patronage to maintain export-oriented primary industry-focused economies. Disgustingly parasitic of the United States but crudely efficient at dominating the world for the past 60 years.

Ick. I'm becoming a realist.