Untitled

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS
ON CORRELATION BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL
AND DOMESTIC LAW AND CONTEMPORARY EVENTS
IRINE KURDADZE
The issue of the correlation of between
International and domestic law is one of the
most complex problems of current importance
in the doctrin of international law.
The growing integration processes in the
contemporary world brought about the rapprochement
of international and national law
in the last decade. This is indicated also by
the fact that international law does not only
represent the tool for international relations
of states (as this used to be in the past), but
has also turned into the domestic regulation
mechanism. The universalisation of economic,
transport and information links, the intensification
of the global ecological problems,
mass character of migration, and what is most
important, the necessity of keeping under the
control the matters related to the protection
of peace and security, the production of the
mass destruction weapons, the fight against
international terrorism, etc. created a strong
objective basis for strengthening this trend.
The new world order requires on the one hand
bringing national decisions closer and on the
other hand making common decisions by the
international community.
A number of challenging questions
emerge, which call for political and legal solution:
how shall the state sovereign rights be
correlated with the authority of international
organizations Is it acceptable to limit the first
How shall the interests of parties be protected
on an equal footing To what extent can
international norms and mechanisms serving
this purpose be used
At the current stage, when the international
law is attributed such a great importance,
in the case of clash of the norms of international
and domestic law the question, as to
which shall be given a priority, is increasingly
becoming an issue of deliberation of the inernational
courts. The case law, on its turn, in
the theory of international law causes the problem
of correlation of international and national
law.
In the past the international law researchers
didnot conside the problem of correlation
separately, as the latter did not have a significant
practical importance.
Starting from the 19 th century the two directions
have been formed in international law
in relation with the issue of correlation: the
dualistic and monistic. The concept of the dualistic
theory was based on the following thesis
– international and domestic law are two
separate legal systems and therefore, primacy
of any of those over the other is excluded.
The dualistic theory as a result of influence
of the positivism emergea, which dominated
in XIX-XX centuries. As it is well known,
the positivism school rejected the significance
of the natural law and considered the law as
the rule of behavior established and provided
for by state power. Only those rules of behavior
formulated by the mutual explicit (treaty)
or implicit (custom) agreements of states were
recognized to be rules of international law. The
positivism was trying to strengthen the practice
of the bourgeois states, protect their sovereignty
and independence. At that stage the
international law encompassed relatively limited
number of domestic issues of states. The
international and national law contradicted
each other mainly in diplomatic and sale issues,
the rights of foreigners, the regime of
sailing. The trends of free trade were perceptible
in international politics. Later on the
boosting of international bonds resulted in the
widening of the circle of matters to be regulated
by international and national law.
The German lawyer Triepel in his work
“International Law and National Law”, pub-
21