A Functional Assessment of the Present-Day Relevance of the Special Chambers of the International Court of Justice through a Comparative Lens

The special chambers of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hardly bear any critical legal significance now. Although a few of the chambers’ rulings were instrumental in shaping the international political, strategic and legal discourses, no special chambers were instituted for more than 20 years now, indicating further that disputing parties prefer a full court or ad-hoc international arbitral tribunals to a chamber court system. In view of the above, this chapter attempts to revisit the chamber court jurisprudence of the ICJ in light of the ad-hoc international arbitral tribunals. Invoking a functionalist perspective, the chapter compares the rulings of the special chambers with that of a few ad-hoc international arbitral tribunals. The objective of the chapter is to critically assess the role and contemporary relevance of the special chambers of the ICJ in rule adjudication. The principal argument resonating in this chapter is that the special chambers have lost their legal and functional relevance and therefore the requisite provisions of the statute of ICJ governing the chamber court jurisprudence need to be amended accordingly. The chapter uses secondary data and employs a doctrinal method to reach tentative findings. It invokes comparative and descriptive approaches to expand on the findings.