The International Law Commission and the International Law Codification Market

Abstract

There must be hundreds of university teachers of international law around the world, and I am one of them. I am teaching students at the University of Economics in Prague. Some of them head into national or international business or media, some become diplomats, others start their career at a ministry of foreign affairs or in international institutions. My aim is to introduce them to international law, visualize and explain the mechanisms of creation and application of international rules and principles, as well as of peaceful settlement of disputes, and also to provide them with some orientation among the many institutions in the “international law universe”. My students, on the other hand, bring into our discussions in lectures and seminars their fresh, young look at different international legal topics and confront me with their knowledge from other courses. Compared to students pursuing a law degree, our students have a blurrier awareness of how legislation and the law work. In their deliberations about current international events, they are not restricted by such knowledge and that is why their arguments and views may be sometimes naïve and sometimes inspiring. I was thinking about my students often when I was preparing this presentation and I am very grateful for all the opinions and ideas about international law that they were willing to “trade” with me and that ultimately led me to the idea of the international law codification market. Let me introduce this market, identify trends concerning it and formulate a few predictions. Further, this contribution will touch on other questions (e.g. the composition of the International Law Commission) discussed during the celebration of the Commission’s seventieth anniversary event in Geneva in July 2018.