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* Associate Professor of International Law, University of Rome 'La Sapienza' [
].
1.
Introduction
Intervention under Article 62 of the ICJ Statute is an incidental proceeding aimed at protecting third states whose legal interests may be at issue in contentious cases before the ICJ. 1 Together with Article 63 of the Statute, this provision ensures the participation of third states in a pending litigation before the Court. The two separate forms of intervention envisaged by the Statute apply to distinct situations and require different conditions to be fulfilled. According to Article 63, a third state can intervene when it is a party to a multilateral treaty whose construction is in question before the Court. According to Article 62, a third state can intervene when its legal interests may be affected by the decision of the Court in the main proceedings.
Permission to intervene under Article 62 has been granted only in a very limited number of cases. 2 The case law of the ICJ has gradually narrowed the field of application of intervention through a very restrictive interpretation of the conditions to be met to accord permission to intervene. 3 The definition of the 'interest of a legal nature' required under Article 62 to grant a third state permission to intervene is a crucial issue in that regard. Broadening or narrowing the scope of intervention largely depends upon the kind of legal interest that the ICJ regards as sufficient to justify intervention. Yet, this notion is still largely uncertain. 4
In 2011, the Court adopted three decisions concerning the applications by Costa Rica, Greece, and Honduras for permission to intervene. 5 These decisions merit particular attention because, on the one hand, two of them address directly the notion of 'legal interest' and, on the other hand, they provide a number of elements that are quite useful in defining with more precision the different types of legal interest justifying the involvement of third states in proceedings before the Court.
The present analysis will first take into account the contribution of the recent decisions to the general definition of the legal interest that a third state must prove in order to be permitted to intervene in a contentious case...