 As recalled at the end of week 2, the International Court of Justice is, according to article 92 of the UN Charter, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. The seat of the court is established in the Hague, in the Netherlands, and since its foundation, as you know, the court's address is the Peace Palace, built by the Carnegie Foundation and also used by the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The statute of the ICJ is based upon the statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice, and the statute of the ICJ forms an integral part of the Charter, as stated by article 92. And this means that the member states of the UN, because they are party to the Charter, are also necessarily party to the statute of the court, which is attached to the Charter. And this stands in sharp contrast to the system of the PCIJ, as the PCIJ was envisaged by the Covenant of the League of Nations, but its statute was a separate and distinct document later concluded in 1920. The PCIJ was the predecessor to the ICJ, and it functioned between 1922 and 1946, when the ICJ took over from it. And there is a clear institutional continuity between the PCIJ and the ICJ. That continuity is noted under article 92 of the Charter, but also under article 36, paragraph 5, and article 37 of the statute, and you may want to have a look at those provisions by yourself. Moreover, the ICJ refers to the PCIJ judgments, decisions and opinions as if they were part of its own case law. The ICJ is a permanent body of 15 judges, all of different nationalities, and they are elected by the General Assembly and the Security Council for a term of nine years, and judges may be re-elected. Article 4 to 12 of the ICJ statute provides for a complex system of voting, and without going too much into details, suffice it to say that judges are elected, I quote, regardless of their nationality, from among persons of high moral character who possess the qualifications required in their respective countries for appointment to the highest judicial offices or our jurist consults of recognized competence in international law. And of course, this is article 2 of the ICJ statute. Furthermore, under article 9 of the statute, which was inserted in the PCIJ statute by revision of 1929, the judges must represent the main form of civilization and of the principal legal systems of the world. And as a result, and under a well-established, unwritten UN practice since the early 1970s, a number of seats is allocated to each of the various regions of the world. The allocation and the groups very much reflect the Cold War times, but this is how it goes. Five members of the court are elected from the group of Western Europe and other states, a group which includes not only Western European states, but also the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. Three members are elected from the group of African countries, and traditionally there is always at least one member from North Africa. Three members are elected from the Asian group of states, two from the Latin American and Caribbean group, and two from the Eastern European group of states. Furthermore, and despite the fact that the statute proclaims that the judges are elected regardless of their nationality, furthermore the nationality of some of the judges do matter actually in practice. And again, this is an unwritten and informal rule, but it is a very well-established practice. And since 1946, the five permanent members of the U.K. Council, that is the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and the USSR, no Russia, have always had one of their nationals on the bench of the court. And to the exception of the United Kingdom, the so-called P5 nations do not recognize as compulsory the jurisdiction of the court, and we shall see later in this course what this all means, but they nevertheless insist to have one of their nationals at the court. And this means that out of the five seats allocated to the Western European group of states, three are preempted for the U.S., the U.K. and France. While out of the three seats of the Asian group, one is for China, and one out of the two seats of the Eastern group is in practice for Russia. Under Article 4 of the ICJ Statute, judges are elected from a list of persons nominated by the national groups of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. A national group, you may remember, is made up of four persons appointed as members of the PCA, by the member states of the PCA, as we have seen earlier in the course. In order to be elected, a candidate must obtain an absolute majority of votes in the General Assembly and in the Security Council. At the Security Council, no distinction is made between permanent and non-permanent members of the Council for the purpose of the vote, and the permanent members have no veto right for that purpose. This is Article 10 of the Statute. Because it is necessary to proceed with several rounds of voting to obtain converging majorities in both organs. In order not to change the composition of the Court abruptly every nine years, and in order to ensure a certain continuity, elections take place every three years to elect or re-elect five judges. Should a judge resign or die before the end of his or her term of office, a separate election is organised and the newly elected member fills the remaining part of the term. The Court elects its President and Vice President every three years, and the Court also elects the Registrar of the Court every seven years. The Registrar is assisted by a Deputy Registrar appointed by the Court and by a staff of lawyers, translators, librarians, press officers and secretaries. Judges are also assisted by the Registry, including their clerk. The Court usually sits in plenary as full court, but the disputing states may also request the setting up of an ad hoc chamber under Article 26 of the Statute, and both parties have to agree for their case to be heard by an ad hoc chamber. Such chamber is made of five judges, and before composing the chamber, the President of the Court usually ascertains the views of the parties in that regard. So far, six ad hoc chambers have been established in six different cases. The Court also has a chamber of summary procedure, which has not been used, and it established a chamber to hear environmental cases, but the chamber was dissolved and it never served. The ICJ has entertained environmental disputes, but they were handled by the full court. An important institutional feature of the ICJ, which is reminiscent of arbitration, is the possibility for any party which does not have one of its nationals on the bench to appoint an ad hoc judge, a judge ad hoc under Article 31 of the Statute. The judge ad hoc does not need to be a national of the appointing state, and he or she takes part in all the deliberations of the Court that relate to the case for which he or she has been appointed. If judges ad hoc are appointed, the composition of the Court in that case may increase to up to 17 judges. If some judges are sick or unable to attend a hearing or a deliberation, a quorum of nine judges is needed to constitute the Court, and judges ad hoc are not being taken into account for the calculation of the quorum. Judges ad hoc may also be appointed when parties have agreed that their case be heard by an ad hoc chamber, and in such a case, the relative weight of the judges ad hoc will increase as the chamber could be composed of three members of the Court and two judges ad hoc appointed by each party. The Court takes its decision by a majority of the judges present, and in case of equality, the president or acting president in the case has the casting vote. The expenses of the Court are borne by the United Nations, the budget of the Court being decided by the General Assembly, so the parties do not have to pay like in arbitration, they have to pay for their councils only. While the charter and the statute of the Court are treaties that the Court cannot change by itself, the Court is the master of its own procedural rules, called rules of Court. The Court can amend the rules by itself, and this is a usual feature of international courts and tribunals in contrast to domestic courts. The Court is also the master of two other documents that deserve to be mentioned. The first document is called practice directions, and it is addressed to the parties. Those practice directions do not alter the rules, but they are an informal additional to the rules, and as you can read from the Court's website, the Court says that they are the result of the Court's ongoing review of its working methods. The second document that you can also find on the Court's website is what is called the resolution concerning the internal judicial practice of the Court, and it details what happens behind the scenes, and most notably, once a case has been argued by the parties and the Court begins its deliberation, it is an important document to understand how concretely a judgement is made and what is the deliberative process within the Court. And last but not least, the Court's official languages are French and English, and the Court conducts its work in both languages at the same time. French has been traditionally a language of law and diplomacy in the 19th and 20th century, and many of the PCIJ judges and early RCJ judges were actually more fluent in French than in English. And things of course have changed now, but French remains unequal terms, an official language of the Court, and states may correspond and submit their arguments in any of those languages. The fact of having to work in both languages sometimes of course slows down the process. But it also increases the quality of the decisions of the Court as the translation often allows to fix some unclear or ambiguous sentences in both versions. Now that you have a better understanding of what the Court is as an institution, let us turn to the Court's jurisdiction before addressing some procedural matters.