Content area
Full text
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
Only rarely does an international judicial opinion attract attention on the front pages of newspapers around the world, and spur activism-or condemnation-from diverse segments of global civil society. The advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory1 is such a case. As the Court recognized in addressing the question put to it by the United Nations General Assembly, the choice of the term "wall" to designate the subject matter of the proceeding already opens up an area of debate, since not all of the contested structure is a wall in the physical sense.2 The Court chose to follow the lead of the General Assembly on this terminological question, as well as on other matters. By a 14-1 margin, the Court found the construction of the wall in the occupied Palestinian territory to be contrary to international law and declared that Israel is under an obligation to cease its construction and dismantle it forthwith.
The fact that all five paragraphs of the dispositif elicited support from at least thirteen judges (fourteen judges on three dispositive paragraphs and all fifteen on the Court's jurisdiction to decide the request) would appear to indicate a high coherence of view on the main points addressed. Yet this broad support came at the price of a lowest-common-denominator approach to the reasoning of the opinion: on many of the key issues, the Court offered only a few terse sentences of explanation.
In parallel to the proceedings in The Hague, the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, was also considering legal challenges to what was there called the "separation fence,"3 in one of the few (but accumulating) instances where a national tribunal has had to consider how much attention to pay to a proceeding of the International Court. After the ICJ advisory opinion was handed down, the Israeli Supreme Court asked for the views of the government on the import of the International Court's opinion for the questions pending before the Israeli court; at the time this Agora went to press, those views had not yet been formally tendered.
The contributions to this Agora offer diverse perspectives on several of the most controversial aspects...