CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Echoes of this resound today in the words of President George Bush: ‘America will
never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.’ 85
The US raised concerns, too, about the nationality of some of the judges in the
Nicaragua case. It firstly objected that ‘of the 16 judges now claiming to sit in
judgement on the United States in this case, 11 are from countries that do not accept the
Court’s compulsory jurisdiction.’ 86 Moreover, the US argued that part of the
justification for its actions lay with Nicaraguan acts against El Salvador, in whose
defence the US was acting. But ‘much of the evidence that would establish Nicaragua’s
aggression against its neighbors is of a highly sensitive intelligence character. We will
not risk US national security by presenting such sensitive material in public or before a
Court that includes two judges from Warsaw Pact nations.’ 87 This latter point earned
the following rebuke from Sir Robert Jennings 88 , one of the judges in the case, who
noted in his Dissenting Opinion:
I also wish to express my regret that, in a Court which by its Statute is elected in
such a way as to assure “the representation of the main forms of civilization and
of the principal legal systems of the world”, the United States in its statement
accompanying the announcement of the non-participation in the present phase of
the case should have chosen to refer to the national origins of two of the judges
who took part in the earlier phases of the case.
In considering the just war requirement for sovereign authority (see p46 et seq) it was
noted that the existence of supranational authority to which disputes could be referred
for resolution would, as an implication of Aquinas’ doctrine, negate states’ rights to use
force. By corollary, failure of such mechanisms to be effective would restore that right.
The danger for a powerful state in placing itself above, or aside from, the law is that by
doing so its offers justification for others’ use of force against it. Ironically,
dismissing those who said the case for war with Iraq had not been convincingly made
on the grounds either of threat or of humanitarian necessity, Prime Minister Blair
argued that the true reason for war was to enforce compliance with international law:
‘The truth is abundantly plain in the motion before the House of Commons on 18
March, we went to war to enforce compliance with UN Resolutions.’ 89
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