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The Competing Jurisdictions of International Courts and Tribunals. By Yuval Shany. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. lxix, 348. Index. $95, £60.00
The notion of jurisdidio in the international legal order is currently undergoing some dramatic changes. Because of a sharp increase in the number of international courts and tribunals-frequently termed a "proliferation"-the power to state what is lawful (jus dicere) at the international level is increasingly fragmented. This proliferation has resulted mainly from the extension of international law into new areas previously subordinated to states' sovereignty (for example, criminal justice) or to those areas that were basically not regulated multilaterally at all (for example, international trade in services). Since the early 1990s, the following mechanisms have been established: the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the two ad hoc international criminal tribunals, the UN Compensation Commission, the World Bank Inspection Panel and its counterparts at the Asian Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) dispute settlement mechanisms, the Andean and Mercosur dispute settlement systems, and several other regional economic tribunals. In addition, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights were recently established. What is also noticeable is that in addition to the multiplication of dispute settlement procedures, more permanent tribunals have been established and, perhaps, there has been lesser use of ad hoc tribunals.
These recent developments, especially in view of their uncoordinated nature, inherently carry the danger of overlaps in jurisdictional scope. Thus, a given dispute might be brought before more than one dispute settlement mechanism. By way of example, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has jurisdiction to adjudicate any legal dispute between states, may have concurrent jurisdiction with other international tribunals like ITLOS or the WTO dispute settlement mechanisms.
Yuval Shany, a full-time lecturer at the Academic College of Management in Israel, has conducted an important new study on the proliferation of dispute settlement mechanisms and on its legal and policy implications for the international legal order.1 The Competing Jurisdictions of International Courts and Tribunals, an edited version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, was published as part of Oxford University Press's newly...