Principles and Disagreements in International Law (with a View from Dworkin’s Legal Theory)

Abstract

Principles are part of international law as much as of other legal orders. Nonetheless, beyond principles referred to the functioning of international law, or the sector related discipline in discrete fields, those fundamental principles identifying the raison d’être, purpose and value of the legal international order, as a whole, remain much disputed, to say the least. In addressing such a problem, one that deeply affects interpretation and legal adjudication, this chapter acknowledges the limits and weakness of legal positivism in making sense of the inter- and supranational legal order(s). It appraises also the novel from the late Ronald Dworkin, concerning international law, and its consequence for interpretivism in the international environment, so different from State political communities and their “integrity”. Finally, some recent cases before international courts shall be considered, that expose difficulties stemming from traditional legal positivist strictures, and explain how judicial reasoning actually profits from asking further questions of principles. All the more so, if the issues at stake happen to be covered by two or more diverging legal regimes, that would, per se, lead to opposite outcomes.

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1 Introduction

Despite their disputed nature, principles play a cardinal role in international law and in courts not only by filling legal gaps, but also as fundamental means for the interpretation of rules and the enhancement of legal reasoning.¹

A canonical way to see principles in international law places them among the sources of law, as stated by Article 38 (1)(c) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It is to be noted, however, that they can surface within more than one source. In the context of the ICJ, from Article 38 paragraph (1)(a), or (b), i.e. in the application of conventional or customary law by which they might be generated, beyond the separate provision singling out those principles “recognized among civilized nations”, in paragraph (1)(c).² Famously, to the latter Hersch Lauterpacht³—Judge in the ICJ—referred as subsidiary general principles with the special, systemic, function of banning non liquet from the realm of (international) law.

Taking account of that background, the issue can be raised whether some set of principles, distinctively underpinning the international legal order, is capable of shaping its identity: as much as in any (State) legal systems, in their constitutional and primary law, principles frame the fundamental—ethical and political—choices to be pursued. They would function as gap-filling as well as interpretive resources supporting international law as a whole.

Accordingly, they should belong in the fundamental raison d’être of international law properly. Besides principles of law-functioning, referring to how international law can work, like pacta sunt servanda or, say, good faith, they would be closer to the question as to why it is valued and what are being its substantive purposes.

In truth, such a question is not different from the one most recently tackled by the late Ronald Dworkin, in a posthumous article,⁴ suggesting legal principles that, in his view, would frame international law, and help resolving “disagreements” in identifying positive international law norms, to be applied in adjudicative issues.

This chapter shall also consider whether an “interpretive” theory of law (renowned as one addressing the alleged weakness of strict legal positivism) can better suit the increasing appearance of principles and the current evolutionary trends of international law. To this regard, judicial cases, namely those originating from being a single issue under the reach of concurring, and often conflicting, legalities, shall be eventually examined. Among their many functions in international law, principles can help reconciling divergences stemming from the multiplicity of separate “regimes” (presently featuring in international law) that hardly would be solved by “formal” legal tools (lex specialis, lex posterior, etc.).⁵

2 What (and Whose) Principles?

2.1

“General principles of law recognised by civilised nations” (Article 38(1)(c)) are held to play the function of those clauses that in domestic systems refer to natural law (as in the Austrian Civil Code, Article 7) or the general principles of the legal order of the State (Italian Civil Code, preliminary Article 12). As a consequence, reference to them is mainly meant to face the issue of legal lacunae. It embraces the doctrine of a legal system’s completeness, one that in turn justifies, as mentioned above, (the feasibility of) the prohibition of non liquet ⁶: “‘the principle affirming the completeness of the legal order’ is to be seen as ‘the positive formulation of the prohibition of non liquet’”.⁷ And both should be seen as positive rules in customary law. ⁸

In truth, reference to principles belonging to civilised legal systems has been understood as evoking jus gentium, and it is contended upon, between at least two main theoretical strands. One assumes that these principles pertain to no particular system, being instead fundamental to all systems, and showing the essential unity of law, apparently as a matter of reason.⁹ The other derives its rationale from comparative legal approaches: enquiry throughout various national systems shows that the widest consensus supports some legal principles that accordingly become general international law, “independently of custom or treaties”.¹⁰

The resort of general principles, if seen through legal realist lenses, equates with an opening in favour of judicial discretion, if not judicial norm-creation. From some legal realist standpoint, general principles have been feared as the “Trojan horse” of natural law and morality into the interstices of positive norms.¹¹ For Julius Stone (commenting on Lauterpacht):

Even if, for the sake of argument, we were to accept the “natural law” version most favorable to Judge Lauterpacht’s position, namely, that these principles represent a kind of inexhaustible storehouse of potential law, they still would not dispense the judge from making law-creative choices.¹²

Stone stressed the point, later become largely undisputed among legal scholars, that principles might be conflicting themselves, “and, indeed, often to the same principle by reason of its ambiguity, circuity or indeterminacy” can be traced diverse outcomes.¹³ Stone’s early criticism notwithstanding, legal systems are undoubtedly held to include principles, whose standards, far from being a sheer appeal to vague morality or natural law, are positive law essential in the construction of present legal orders.

As I see them, and as legal theory and jurisprudence have abundantly afforded consistent evidence in that regard, principles as normative standards, regardless of their treatment in different legal theories, hold a central place as positive law. Likewise, even those most structural “general principles of law”, play a fundamental function in every legal order: this is why Article 38 of the ICJ Statute upholds them as recognized among civilized nations, given their belonging to law functioning, as Lauterpacht would have them. Bin Cheng’s analysis has recorded the general principles of law through their use by international courts and tribunals and listed several such as self-preservation, good faith (and notably pacta sunt servanda, as well as malicious exercise of a right), varieties of sections on the principle of responsibility (fault, causality, individual responsibility, integral reparation, among them), most principles in judicial proceedings (from those inherent in jurisdiction to the various jura novit curia, audiatur et altera pars, nemo judex in causa propria, res judicata, etc.).¹⁴

2.2

Also due to the special features of the international legal system, the capacity and latitude of fixed rules stricto sensu, in a positivist view, appears at times limited: be it a matter of completeness of the system or otherwise, there are cases where international norms have led to no answer or otherwise stated, unsatisfactory outcomes. As Jan Klabbers has recalled:

[M]any have held that the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was illegal, yet legitimate; the non-activity of the United Nations in Rwanda or Srebrenica, in the mid-1990s, was legally difficult to condemn, yet morally wrong.¹⁵

It is because of these and similar issues, that Klabbers is focusing on some “virtue ethics” that should be inherently essential for at least those that are entrusted to make the most of international law norms, and international judges among them.¹⁶ And not by chance, among the general principles of international law, good faith is in pride of place in measuring how should the key norm—pacta sunt servanda—be observed.¹⁷

However, aside from the prospect of a possible virtue ethics in international law, as a matter of fact those problems that stem from missing or conflicting norms—or that as such are perceived—seem to be increasingly apparent in international law context, all the more so due to the more demanding objectives of the “civilised nations” in the last sixty years. Thus, the full range of available international law principles is hardly overestimated and should better be felt as part of an ongoing constructive endeavor: it embraces certainly general principles of the law of civilized nations, principles of law-functioning, but also the principles belonging to specialized international rule-making (in, say, trade law, human rights law, environmental law, humanitarian law and the like).¹⁸ Nonetheless, it is worth supposing that adjudicative matters would better be viewed could one be drawing on principles bearing some substantive raison d’être of international law as a specific legal order.

To such principles might lead, for example, Anne Peters “compensatory constitutionalism” as encapsulating a general rationale of current international law. It conceives international law under a specific understanding which, through evidence of what she defines micro and macro constitutionalisation trends, enhances fundamental norms that would help manage transnational level issues. Conflict-solution requires a balancing of interests in the concrete case, in the absence of abstract hierarchy. According to Peters, the international lawyer should determine “the supremacy of international law over domestic constitutional law in a non formalist way”, that is, assessing the rank of the norms at stake “according to their substantial weight and significance”.¹⁹ However, fundamental norms would require some legitimacy, in the absence of a true international constitution, while State sovereignty and consent are no longer accepted as the sole source of legitimacy of international law.²⁰

As I see it, the interplay between different regimes of law and separate orders in the global intercourses should be guided through mutually pondering their respective fundamental principles; as they function like hermeneutic sources of interpretation of rules, it is relevant how international law rationale and legitimacy are justified and through what substantive principles.

2.3

Such a question is of a type familiar to State legal orders and to constitutional reasoning in the last decades. It is plain fact that substantive principles, often enshrined in our Constitutions, define scope, values, and purpose of a legal order as a whole, by channelling rules’ interpretation on one side and, on the other, connecting its general coherence both to the logical consistency of its norms and to the evolving political-ethical pillars of its own community of people.

Although such a role of principles has become uncontested, it was famously made part of a self-standing theory of law, neither positivist nor naturalist, but interpretivist, by Ronald Dworkin: a theory that is centred explicitly upon the adjudicative side.²¹ Each legal order is to be referred to its own community, and principles belong to or constitute a bridge toward the integrity of its political morality. In truth, an interpretivist theory of law could accordingly be extended to international law, as much as to any legal orders properly meant, provided that a general rationale characterising the essential principles in the political morality of an international system of law is found.

However, in the tradition of legal positivism, from Austin to Hart, the very foundations and the maturity of international law as a legal order were never fully recognised,²² on the other hand, substantive principles, of an ultimate nature, sustaining international law are not easily (nor unanimously) presupposed, despite the number of supranational preambles, charters, conventions and quasi-universal convergence upon peace, security, human rights (let alone jus cogens and banning of war, torture, genocide, slavery). It is contentious if historical progress of international law has overcome the traditional core of a law treating bilateral interests under the dogma of States’ free will; if a super partes law,²³ to be oriented by the interests of humanity has changed its nature²⁴; if individuals have superseded States as the ultimate subjects for whose sake sovereignty itself appears now a conditional notion,²⁵ and so forth.

If we imagined to adopt an interpretivist approach, by Dworkin’s lessons drawn on Western constitutional States, it would be arduous to argue through the key notion of integrity,²⁶ extended to international law. That concept connects coherence of a legal order with the political morality of a well-defined social polity, while inter-state arena would still lack the unity of something like a universal community.

Nonetheless, in the article of his last days,²⁷ eventually Dworkin tried to offer the missing template for international law, and extended his “interpretivist” theory of law to the domain of extra-State law, by providing some newly forged support.

He did so, by spelling what he believed the fundamental principles that specifically attain to international law, those that should justify the existence of the international legal order. Of course, even if found controversial, still they can set the scene for a long awaited focus upon the distinctive underpinning of international law, thereby making interpretive endeavour to begin as a principle-based exercise.

3 The Late Dworkin’s Theory of International Law

3.1

Dworkin rejects the positivist and Hartian idea²⁸ according to which rules are valid only depending on the criteria of recognition spelled by a fundamental secondary rule of the legal system. He refutes on one side the conclusiveness of such a theory as policing system’s borders, on the other side, the social convention that is held to pinpoint specifically the birth and life of international law, that is, States’ consent.

The latter remains unpersuasive: it does not establish any priority among sources, gives no clue on whose consent is ultimately relevant, or when customary rules become peremptory; and what have States consented to remains often disputed (in many cases text cannot be decisive: e.g. Article 2(4) UN Charter on prohibition of the use of force). Even more fundamentally, for States to accept something as law, “they need some other standard to decide what they should regard as law”.²⁹ That more basic principle, not the fact of consent, provides “the grounds of international law”: similarly, the obligating strength of promises, cannot be due to the mere fact of promising.³⁰

Thus, being consent irredeemably flawed (and Dworkin is not alone in making that point),³¹ the “sociological” and descriptive answer according to which international law is law because it is believed law by “almost everyone”³² cannot be final.³³

Briefly to resume, Dworkin states that it is in order to improve the legitimacy of their coercive strength vis-à-vis their citizens, that States have a duty to accept a mitigation of their own power and to “accept feasible and shared constraints” based on international law.³⁴ It is today adequate for the State to achieve its legitimacy only if its coercive power is “consistent with the dignity of citizens”, that is, a matter of substance not of pedigree; and similarly, even the international order makes up for the coercive system that States impose to their citizen: for the State, “it follows that the general obligation to try to improve its political legitimacy includes an obligation to try to improve the overall international system”³⁵ (that means, so improving its own government legitimacy), and such an obligation includes cooperative duties, beyond a law of co-existence.³⁶

The latter shall be all the more relevant in the future, if we think of those challenges to States self-referentiality stemming from climate change or other environmental interests common to all peoples.

However, of itself, such a principle of mitigation is insufficiently determinative as to different possible regimes of international law; accordingly Dworkin coins the principle of salience. It is a normative principle itself, and works in connection with the first. It establishes the duty prima facie to abide by codes and practices already agreed upon by a consistent number of States and populations. A duty that shall have an obvious “snowballing effect”.³⁷ The moral obligation of all nations—for example, to treat UN law as law—flows from the combined sense of those two principles, and explains as well why even States’ Constitutions tend to include and protect more widespread rules considered as jus gentium or even peremptory jus cogens.

3.2

Dworkin does not embrace any cosmopolitan view. International law principles are traced back to the rationale of the relationship between State power and its citizens, not to a global hypothetical government or to universal justice. It is a second level order of States, and international organisations, to matter, not a universal community of individuals. As far as I can see, even the “political morality” of the international system can only enjoy a second level status, that is, the integrity of its values has a derivative status not a self-standing substantive content. And in fact mitigation applies to the system of sovereigns. Therefore, even one of the fundamental canons of Dworkin’s general philosophy, equal concern and respect ³⁸ for each individuals, does not feature within the scope of international law immediately. Mitigation and salience refer to States’ system (or to powerful international organisations) premised on the general duty of States to protect the dignity of individuals. Because States shall have to respect citizens’ rights, their sovereignty shall not prevent other States’ intervention to stop genocide; mitigation shall ask States not to refuse cooperation in facing communal interest of humanity, be it concerning security, hunger, environmental protection. Mitigation is explained, in a nutshell, as a source of both negative and positive duties. Although Dworkin suggests, as “phantasy upon phantasy”, an international court having jurisdiction “over all the nations of the world”, such a thought-experiment comes with a clear statement about the domain of international law: a very distinct part of what “morality and decency require of States and other international bodies in their treatment of one another”.³⁹ And again along these lines he asks which argument a hypothetical court should use to determine “the rights and obligations of States (and other international actors and organizations) that it would be appropriate for it to enforce coercively?”.⁴⁰ So the question is defined by the borders of the Westphalian system of States and within them. States are the theoretical bridge between social communities of individuals and international law.

All in all, the “new philosophy” can be seen as an upgrade in theory, intended to explain the state of the art in international law and to validate a legal order through its own systemic principles, replacing the presumption of consent. But once this reconstruction of international law has been done, international law becomes suited to Dworkinian theory of law as interpretive (as opposed to positivist theories of law, or natural law).

4 The Features of an Interpretive (Adjudicative) Theory of Law

The features of interpretivism were spelled by Dworking in the last decades, and not with reference to international law. What Dworkin can contribute here, mirrors the logic of his criticism to Hartian theory in the ‘70s: roughly, the positivist view leaves too much to lawyers’ discretion. Note that even with international law, Dworkin now warns that the recurrent appeal to morality as a direct reason for action, outside what law is held to prescribe (as Franck did in the case of NATO intervention in Kosovo)⁴¹ would be a fatal undermining of the still fragile international law. What Dworkin is thinking about is the relocation of those choices—deemed to be morally, although not legally, mandatory—as disagreements within the legal domain. And this can be done, as we already know, by interpreting “the documents and practices picked out by the principle of salience so as to advance the imputed purpose of mitigating the flaws and dangers of the Westphalian system”.⁴²

However, as to the nature of law being interpretive, there is no novelty distinctive to international law. Law is interpretive because it postulates a practice where participants can disagree about what the practice (like international law) really requires, and assign a value and a purpose⁴³ to it, achieve insights about conditions of truth of particular propositions of law under those purposes and within the constraints of historical records, documents and relevant materials, sources shaping the object of that practice.⁴⁴

It is of importance that nowhere Dworkin denies that such structures, rules, and institutions are central to the existence or identification of a legal system.⁴⁵ However, being law interpretive, a descriptive/sociological view would not be definitive or sufficiently determinative as regards the doctrinal questions concerning what is the law in particular cases. Questions about the truth of propositions of law—or about whether and how a norm (or even a judicial outcome) is “valid”—are normally traced back to the grounds of law,⁴⁶ that is, to the existing institutional premises (judicial precedents, legislation, procedural requirements, and the like) that “positivism” identifies by consensus. Such questions are allegedly solved, according to Hartian legal positivism, by verifying whether the required historical facts have been met (the proper procedural enactment, the “right” source etc.). Although criteria of identification are provided in the rule of recognition of a legal order, disagreement would nonetheless possibly persist. True disagreements are hardly revolving around what the actual grounds of law are, their empirical (historical) existence and pedigree. Genuine disagreements, with Dworkin (who calls them “theoretical”) reach the identity (value and purpose) of the grounds of law, beyond their existence. Under contestation is not “what really happened”, but what legal scope and import it should bear (not whether the parliament has actually legislated, but what consequence should be ascribed to that). Being not empirical, they involve evaluations of principle. Indeed, they depend on the ascription of different meaning and purpose to those grounds of law once factually identified. Accordingly, invoking some different principles of political morality (involving the identity, scope, and value of the institutional system as a whole) determines different interpretations of the same grounds of law and corresponding answers to the problem of what the law is, i.e. the truth of legal propositions.⁴⁷

Of course, from such a perspective, the positivist assumption of consensus on the (interpretation of) grounds of law is untenable. Scott Shapiro has nicely summarized the positivist puzzle to this regard:

[I]t is common ground between exclusive and inclusive legal positivists that the grounds of law are determined by convention. How can they account for disagreements about the legal bindingness of certain facts whose bindingness, by hypothesis, requires the existence of agreement on their bindingness?⁴⁸

Accordingly, if we do not wish to disregard the domain of international law, as a legal one, we cannot ignore the interpretive reading.⁴⁹

5 Multiple Legalities, Principles and Exemplary Case Law

5.1

After Dworkin’s explicit contribution to international law, one further aspect, however, is to be mentioned, one that, as I shall submit, belongs to the potentialities of interpretivism within international law, although it is not either identified or elaborated upon by Dworkin himself. Because of international law being re-directed towards principles, they can also get to a function that legal positivism is hardly equipped to sustain or even admit. As I maintain, principles can be resorted to in order to explain and possibly solve disagreements on the valid rule to be applied, not only in those circumstances of routine, current in State legal orders (like gap-filling, rules interpretation, contrast among relevant principles, for example) but even, and all the more so, when divergences concern meaning, import, and scope of norms that, though controlling one single case at stake, might belong in separate legalities: the latter confront each other and each would lead to different legal outcomes, providing a different point of view as to validity. In other words, principles can have a further role in addressing disagreements arising from the segmented texture of supranational law and the issues covered, often divergently, by different legal institutional regimes. It can be argued that, on one side, disagreements about the valid rule to be applied cannot be overcome by reference to the criteria in the rule of recognition controlling the jurisdictional scope of one (among the) relevant legal regime(s). On the other side, judicial decision-making has (cf. sections below) deployed a principled-based reasoning in order to address problems located at the crossroads between different legal sub-systems. This move involves the turn to an interpretative notion of law, one which, among the rest, adds to the received dogmas of strict legal positivism, and makes the assessment of principles to appear as the actual frontier of law-findings in international law matters.

That shall be shown by referring to some recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (Al-Jedda and Al-Dulimi) whose reasoning treats divergence between the UN Security Council, the State involved, and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). For convenience we can speak of a kind of second level disagreements.

Proliferation of orders and regimes of law⁵⁰ generates some historical-institutional divergence, through self-referentiality, and implies that the practice of one rule of recognition cannot easily develop in place of the multiplicity of relative rules of recognition.

In the apparent inconclusiveness of “social sources based” law, divergence originates not within one single, self-contained regime, but flows from the institutional, “legally objective” otherness of one (sub)“legality” vis-à-vis the other.

Making sense of such a complex and heterogeneous setting is a constructive endeavour, ultimately prompted by the adjudicative questions: they generate, however, the need of relocating opposite claims within a kind contextual whole, as mutually normative disagreements.

5.2

After fragmented-law exemplary cases, like Mox Plant and others,⁵¹ attention is to be brought to significant judicial decisions following some UN Security Council resolutions. Judicial cases have displayed different attitudes in a progress that goes from a self-referential, or one-sided, to a whole-related, or comprehensive legal reasoning: that is, an argument that works through bridging or integrating, for the case at hand, the normative propositions belonging to different orders involved, that would claim for divergent outcomes.

After the milestone case, Kadi,⁵² at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), others followed at the ECtHR. In Kadi the Court made an argument for European primary law to prevail over the obligations stemming from international law (Article 103 of the UN Charter) to implement a resolution of the UN Security Council. The decision was widely welcomed for its defence of fundamental rights, and also criticised because of withholding the European Union from international law obligations (contrary to the advice of the Court of First Instance—now General Court—in its own Kadi decision),⁵³ thus betraying true internationalism (like the United States, in Medellín ⁵⁴ and elsewhere): a kind of American style exceptionalism,⁵⁵ contradicting the original attitudes of compliance of the European Community in the ‘50s.⁵⁶ Actually, and beyond its many virtues (that such a criticism seems indeed to sideline), the ECJ reasoning amounted to a pronouncement shielded by self-reference to the rule of law in its own jurisdiction: accordingly, not an assessment about the infringement of fundamental rights in a supranational sphere where the two jurisdictions involved are interrelated.⁵⁷ It settled not a question of disagreement, but a question of primacy. The two things are not compatible.

A rather different approach was displayed by the ECtHR in Al-Jedda (2011) and in Al-Dulimi (2012). The ECtHR decides to exceed the latitude of its own jurisdiction as defined by the rules of recognition of the ECHR and resorts to wider principles reflecting the UN system and—as Dworkin would have put it—the deeper political morality of international law as a whole.

The Grand Chamber found in Al-Jedda v. United Kingdom,⁵⁸ that indefinite detention without charge of Al-Jedda (dual citizen British/Iraqi) by the United Kingdom in a Basra facility controlled by British forces was unlawful and infringed his rights to liberty under Article 5 of the ECHR. The ECtHR rejected the opinion upheld by the House of Lords in the United Kingdom (before Al-Jedda’s appeal to the ECtHR) that the indefinite detention of Al-Jedda flowed from compliance with the UN Security Council resolution no. 1546, as requested by Article 103 of the UN Charter.⁵⁹ That argument of conformity held by Lord Bingham does not contest the existence of human rights law, but its import within the system of international law; it amounts to a matter of hierarchy of rules in the international order.⁶⁰

As an answer, the ECtHR walks a peculiar path: contrary to the ECJ in Kadi, it takes larger view than the scope of its own ECHR’s regime, and even larger than the task of individual, human rights’ protection. It takes into consideration the two orders’ interplay and minds of the integrity of the frame of international law, where the European Convention’s regime and the Security Council might sensibly concur, given general international law principles and those of the UN Charter, that is, the supranational and contextual legal setting (in which the Security Council is included). The argument does not touch the last word authority under Article 103 of the UN Charter, but first refuses to agree that the unlawful detention, without judicial review and lacking necessity, was commanded or authorized by the Security Council resolution. The normative context includes Article 1 of the UN Charter entrenching “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms” and Article 24(2) requiring the Security Council to “act in accordance with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations”.⁶¹ Within those premises, not even the imperative of peace and security can be held as unconditional.

According to the ECtHR, since there must be “a presumption that the Security Council does not intend to impose any obligation on Member States to breach fundamental principles of human rights”,⁶² the interpretation must be chosen that “is most in harmony with the requirements of the Convention and which avoids any conflict of obligations”.⁶³ Finally the European Court concedes that it may still be possible that the Security Council would need to impose a rupture in the fabric of UN law, but then this should result only from “clear and explicit language” (para. 102) against international human rights law. As I have submitted elsewhere,⁶⁴ such an argument hardly means that the ECtHR is ready to forfeit its content based logic, and surrender to hierarchy; it hardly means that a “clear and explicit language” would turn legitimate by source what is not (the violation of human rights conventions, outside state of necessity) in the integrity frame that the European Court itself has aptly drawn. In this picture, the ECtHR has built on a notion of legality that is complex enough to ask that whatever “clear and explicit language”, a proposition of law be “true” under an interpretation of the grounds of law that grants equal weight to human rights in the pursuit of the fundamental objectives of the UN.

It is a subsequent decision, namely, Al-Dulimi, to confirm that this interpretation of the import of Al-Jedda is correct. The question would be, in fact, what should happen in case of “clear and explicit language” against human rights law? The European Court has answered that question, overcoming the kind of  acoustic separation between the involved legalities sharing a common terrain, upon which to settle a potential disagreement.

The ECtHR⁶⁵ deals—indirectly—with UN Security Council resolution no. 1483 (2003), which in “clear and explicit language” imposes to Switzerland, allowing to the State no discretion,⁶⁶ the freezing of the assets of Al-Dulimi, one of those blacklisted as suspected terrorist, who had been denied any rights to defence. Since Switzerland⁶⁷ had rejected Al-Dulimi’s complaints and resolved to confiscate his assets, the ECtHR decides that violation of Article 6 of the ECHR (access to justice) has taken place on behalf of the State, and that consequent responsibility falls on it as a member to the European Convention, regardless of the duty to implement sanctions from the Security Council, and even in absence of any State’s discretionary power. In the reasoning of the European Court, judicial review was not granted either at the UN or in the domestic procedure. Denial of access to justice, even in pursuing the legitimate ends of peace and security, is deemed disproportionate to achieve those objectives.

It is important that the ECtHR, in the same vein as in Al-Jedda, does not take a merely external attitude toward the normative corpus of the UN, assuming instead that it should be taken into consideration qua normative in its scope, meaning and aims. Accordingly, its reasoning is not shielded in a self-referential closure, but pursues a comprehensive assessment. This is why it believes that apparently conflicting obligations from the UN Charter and the ECHR must be at their best harmonized and reconciled (Article 31(3)(c), Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) (para. 112). The presumption according to which the Security Council does not in principle mean to impose obligations contradicting international laws of human rights (formulated in its Al-Jedda decision) is defeated. But it follows that, however commanded by the highest source in UN security purposes, not every behaviour can be deemed legitimate, just for that. The European Court engages in a proportionality judgment, that is, a contextual evaluation between two divergent rules-principles, one that might exceed the strict limits of its own jurisdiction (such a judgment implies a revision of the legality of the Security Council resolution, that other courts in the European Union case had considered themselves not competent to pursue).

But such an assessment can only flow from taking the participant’s point of view⁶⁸ in the interconnection of diverse international law regimes, prompted by the case under scrutiny. It requires bridging the gap that separates the two orders, that is, a deeper self-understanding of one regime’s role as an agent of international law as a whole, and a further insight into the purposes and meaning concerning the “grounds” of those laws, the mutual relation between institutions, and the founding ideals of the diverse orders in their integrity. No place the ECtHR merely resorts to “formal” tools.

It has been from such an approach that the European Court has chosen (right or wrong) to hold the State “responsible”, putting the State “caught between the obligation to carry out Security Council decisions under Article 25 of the UN Charter and the obligation to respect international or regional human rights guarantees”.⁶⁹ It is however preeminent point here that its reasoning implies a value choice, one that would be itself arbitrary, according to a positivist construction of the international system under a UN supremacy clause; this value choice opposes the assumption that absolute supremacy of Security Council would always fulfil its substantive raison d’être. The interplay between security and rights, viewed under a proportionality judgment, can basically depend on a further principle underlying the purpose of the international system. One could even submit that the argument here could easily conform to a general principle of power mitigation: in the sense that it both justifies the role of the Security Council vis-à-vis States arbitrary power and at the same time limits the Security Council itself in pursuing its tasks.

6 As a Conclusion

The cases recalled above from Kadi to Al-Jedda and Al-Dulimi should also be taken to show that in the relations between separate regimes of law, and in the relations between State legal orders and international law, the “plain fact view” and the only reference to the historical, social facts of rules-production by predefined sources, leave inevitably, outside the State, a very ample room for disagreement: one that does not in fact concern the existence of documents, institutions and orders, but the import and meaning that should be ascribed to them either in isolation or in the mutual relations among legalities. Genuine disagreement originates here despite the very fact that no contestation arises as regards the sources of the relevant rules (say, Article 103 of the UN Charter, or any of the Security Council resolutions). This not “empirical” disagreement exceeds the range of control conceived through “normal” legal positivism. Disagreements that Dworkin saw “theoretical” are essentially involving different interpretations-understanding of the fundamental principles, in the political-moral sense, that institutions of law are meant to be premised on.

The key vault in the relations among mutually external (or self-contained) legalities, is the recognition of their being both relevant and thus equally internal to the case at stake. In such a context, different interpretations of respective grounds of law need to be further elaborated in the interplay among legalities (that actually escape a clear hierarchical systematization) endowed, in the global space, with distinctive rules of recognition. Given the angle of the case, the ECtHR’s reasoning might on one side be viewed as interpreting the rules and principles of each involved legal regimes, and on the other side arbitrating their interplay on a proportionality assessment. One possible argument to justify this latter move, that is, a kind of “jurisdiction overstepping”, requires appeal to further principle premised to supranational law, beyond States. A plausible candidate might be the Dworkinian principle of mitigation of States’ power and of international organisations, one that justifies both positive and negative duties. It turns to the political morality of social communities under States purview. It substantively refers to the essential concern and respect for the dignity of citizens, asking that the exercise of power, from whichever actors, can only be legitimate under the limitations that such respect imposes to each concurring regime of law on a case by case basis. From the foregoing, the role and potential of “principles” in the different guises and levels analysed in this chapter, can all the more be seen at the forefront of international law adjudication.