CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

each Member undertakes to comply with the decision of the Court in any case to
which it is a party,
… , … ,
2. Makes an urgent and solemn call for full compliance with the judgement
of the International Court of Justice of 27 June 1986 in the case of Military and
Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (S/18221); …
The US exercised its veto. (The UK abstained). Explaining his country’s negative vote
the US representative argued that the resolution would have added nothing to the
achievement of a peaceful and just settlement of the dispute; that it failed accurately to
represent the situation in Central America; and he reiterated the US view that the Court
had asserted jurisdiction without proper basis. 80 The matter was not formally closed
until 1991 when, with the ending of the civil war and the election of President Barrios
de Chamorro, Nicaragua withdraw the case 81 as a result of intense pressure from the
Bush Administration which made such renunciation a condition of future US aid. 82
The point here is not to attack the United States for its actions in Nicaragua, nor its
refusal to recognise the jurisdiction of the Court, nor even its partisan use of the veto to
protect itself from censure. Rather it is to highlight by way of a stark example, a
principal failure of the legalist paradigm: the law is nothing if it is not applicable in
equal measure to all. US rejection of the Court’s jurisdiction was on the grounds that
much of the world ‘often opposes the United States on important international
questions’ thereby obliging it to ‘reserve to ourselves the power to determine..(what
falls) essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States, as determined by
the United States’ 83 A similar statement is to be found as early in the development of
the legalist paradigm as the US reservations to the post-World War One Peace Treaty
with Germany, in the formative days of the League of Nations:
The United States reserves to itself exclusively the right to decide what
questions are within its domestic jurisdiction, and declares that all domestic and
political questions relating wholly or in part to its internal affairs, ….. are solely
within the jurisdiction of the United States and are not under this Treaty to be
submitted in any way either to arbitration or to the consideration of the Council
or of the Assembly of the League of Nations or any agency thereof, or to the
decision or recommendation of any other Power. 84
92