International Justice: Looking to the Future

The conference was organized by the National Research University Higher School of Economics in cooperation with the journal International Justice.

In 2021, the International Justice Journal (Mezhdunarodnoe Pravosudie) has been celebrating its first 10th anniversary. Past ten years of international justice were rich not only in its quantitative, but in its qualitative sense:

• they have demonstrated a rise of the interstate disputes;
• the ICC was trying to transcend its perception as a ‘court for Africa’;
• some highest domestic courts have challenged the authority of the ECtHR, as well as the ICJ, and the CJ EU;
• the WTO dispute settlement system faced the appellate body crisis, and there have been started intergovernmental talks at the UNCITRAL with a view to reforming the existing investor-state dispute settlement system.

Russia was a part and a participant of many of these changes: it experienced several rounds of the ‘Yukos’ lawfare’, is facing a growing number of international cases with respect of Crimea, South Ossetia, and the downing of MH17. As a result of the reform of 2020, Russia has become the only state that has set up the competence of the Constitutional court to decide on the enforceability of the judgments of the international courts at the constitutional level.

The academic conference ‘International Justice: Looking to the Future’ was thought to take all these processes as the background for exchanging different views on the structured vision of the future of international courts and tribunals, their power and authority, and interrelation with the domestic courts. The use of methods of ‘future studies’ or ‘foresight’ for international justice should assist in the critical assessment of what should be changed and what should be kept, what should serve as the basis for the re-imagination of international justice, which factors and trends will influence the forthcoming developments. With this aim, the conference dwelled into methodological and theoretical issues of the future of international justice, dealt with the interrelation between international and domestic courts, and analyzed the peculiarities of development of the ICJ, the ECHR, the ICC and international criminal tribunals, WTO dispute settlement body, Court of the Eurasian Economic Union, and the international investment arbitration.

Panels

• Interaction between International and National Courts: Competition, Resistance, Cooperation, or a Mixture? (the contours of a new model or models of the relationship between international and national courts);
• European Court of Human Rights: Between Judicial Diplomacy and Principled Resistance (Reform of the ECtHR: its outcomes and perspectives; evolutive interpretation of the Convention and its limits; execution of the ECtHR judgments; relationships between the ECtHR and other international as well as domestic courts);
• International Criminal Justice as a Field for Reforms (reform of the ICC, new “hybrid” and specialized tribunals, regional criminal justice, expansion of subject-matter jurisdiction beyond the core international crimes and traditional actors);
• Settlement of Trade Disputes: Regionalism vs Multilateralism (dispute settlement crisis of the multilateral trading system; the role of regionalism and its relationship with the WTO regime);
• Investment Disputes: a Hard Road Ahead (tracks for the reforming of the investor-state dispute settlement system).

Conference program (.pdf)