 As we have seen last week when speaking about the right to invoke the responsibility of a state for the alleged breach of a Nerga-Homne's obligation, invoking the responsibility of a state and being actually able to bring a claim before an international court or tribunal are two different things. And the latter is only possible if consent to the jurisdiction exists. According to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, that is accepting that the court entertains the dispute and takes a binding decision about it, that is the second and ratione materie condition that must be met for the court to have jurisdiction. And compared to many other international court and tribunals, the specificity of the jurisdiction ratione materie of the ICJ is that it is not specialized in any field or subfield of international law. The court has a general jurisdiction and provided that the parties to the dispute have accepted that it be settled by the court, the court will have jurisdiction to adjudicate upon it whatever the subject matter or the subfield of international law relevant. Therefore, the dispute can be about, for instance, the use of force or territorial or maritime borders, environmental protection, human rights, investment, etc. But because consent to the ICJ jurisdiction is often phrased in such a way that it is conditioned upon the unavailability of any other dispute settlement mechanism, because of that, if other specialized courts or tribunals are available, the court's jurisdiction will not be established. And there is no exception to the requirement that both parties must have consented to the jurisdiction of the court, and even the character of the norm allegedly breached does not exempt from such fundamental requirement. And as the court stressed in 2006, in a case between the DRC and Rwanda, the fact that a dispute relates to compliance with a peremptory norm of general international law, that is a norm of use corgents, like the prohibition of genocide, this fact, I quote, cannot of itself provide a basis for the jurisdiction of the court to entertain that dispute under the court's statute that jurisdiction is always based on the consent of the parties, end of quote. How do states express their consent to the jurisdiction of the court? Well, there are four different means available to states in order to accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ, and you are already familiar with two of those means, as they are common to arbitration and to ICJ proceedings. Those are special agreements and compromising clauses that are also called jurisdictional clauses. The two other ways to express consent are forum prorogatum and the optional clause, which is specific to the ICJ. And let me say a few words about each of those means to accept the jurisdiction of the court and start in this video with special agreements and forum prorogatum. Both are ways to express consent to the ICJ jurisdiction after a dispute has already arisen and exists. As recalled in the section about arbitration, states are sometimes unable or even unwilling to accommodate their respective claims and positions. They cannot reach a compromise. They cannot find a negotiated settlement. However, disputing states may agree that because they disagree on substance, they nevertheless agree to submit their dispute to the ICJ. Article 36 paragraph one of the statute of the court states that, I quote, the jurisdiction of the court comprises all cases which the parties refer to it, and all matters specially provided for in the charter of the UN are in treaties and convention in force, and I'll come back to that. Parties to a dispute are indeed always free to refer their dispute to the court for adjudication, provided, of course, that those parties have access to the court under the rationer-personer requirement. And when states decide to refer an existing dispute to the court, they draft the terms of what is called a special agreement in which the subject matter of the dispute and the identity of the parties to it are indicated. The special agreement is then notified to the court and the jurisdiction of the court will be limited to what has been agreed by the parties in the special agreement. And it is easy to spot if a case has been submitted to the court by special agreement because the case will not be referred as state A versus state B, where V stands for versus, but it will be referred to as state A slash state B. And there is a graphic difference between cases submitted by special agreement slash or by unilateral application V, as if cases brought by special agreements were somehow less contentious than cases brought by applications. Sometimes the very existence of a special agreement is disputed and the case is for that reason noted as a really contentious case, V. In the agency continental shelf case, Greece argued that Turkey had consented to submit their dispute to the ICJ by a joint communique following a meeting between the two prime ministers in Brussels in May 1975. And the court said that there was no specific form for a special agreement to exist and that a joint communique could indeed incorporate a special agreement. But that in light of the terms and the circumstances surrounding the joint communique, the Brussels communique, I quote, was not intended to and did not constitute an immediate commitment by the Greek and Turkish prime ministers on behalf of their respective governments to accept unconditionally the unilateral submission of the dispute to the court. And of course, this is a judgment of 1978. In a case between Qatar and Bahrain, the court considered that the exchange of letters between the king of Saudi Arabia and the two emirs of both countries in 1897, together with the minutes signed in Doha by the foreign affairs ministers of the three countries about three years later, that all those documents constituted international agreements, created rights and obligations for the parties under which they had undertaken to submit to the court, the whole dispute between them relating to the maritime delimitation and some territorial questions. And this is a judgment of 1994. Sometimes or rather quite often, it is not the existence of the special agreement that is disputed, but the meaning of its terms. The court is then called to interpret a special agreement which is very much like a bilateral treaty with a specific object and purpose. And this happened already in the very first case submitted to the court in 1949, the Corfu Channel case. The case was first submitted by an application of the United Kingdom and later then by a special agreement between the UK and Albania. Albania contested that the court could decide on the amount of compensation it had to pay for the damages caused to the British Navy ships because the special agreement only mentioned the issue of deciding on the responsibility for the naval incident that occurred in the Corfu Channel. However, taking argument of the principle of effet utile in the interpretation of international agreements that you may remember, the court said that because it found Albania responsible for the incident, it also had jurisdiction to assess the damage. A special agreement allows the parties to confer jurisdiction to the court and they may define rather freely the limits of such jurisdiction. However, a special agreement cannot allow the parties to the dispute to alter the court's judicial function. And this is because the limits of the judicial functions of the court are defined by the statute itself. Therefore, the judicial functions of the court is not at the disposal of the parties, not even by agreement between them. And as the court stressed in 2013 in the Burkina Faso Niger case, the limits to the judicial functions are mandatory for the parties just as for the court itself. One essential element is in that regard is that the court has been instituted to resolve existing disputes between states so that the existence of a dispute is, as the court put it in the nuclear test case, is the primary condition for the court to exercise its judicial function. If there is no dispute between the parties about a point of fact or a factor or a point of law, the court has no jurisdiction over it and the parties cannot confer such power of jurisdiction to the court by agreement between them. Therefore, as the court said in the Burkina Faso Niger case, a party may not request from the court on the basis of the special agreement that the court includes in the operative part of its judgment an agreement that exists between the parties. The purpose of such inclusion would be to give the force of a court's judgment to the agreement of the parties. But because the operative parts of the judgments of the court contain the decisions of the court over existing disputes, it would be contrary to the court's function to do so because as a result of the parties' agreement, no decision of the court over a dispute is needed. So far, on special agreement. Let me turn to Forum Prorogatum, which is also a way to consent to the jurisdiction of the court when a dispute already exists. Special agreements must, as a matter of principle, be concluded prior to the moment the court is seized of a particular existing dispute. It is, however, possible that one state submits a dispute to the court in the absence of any basis of jurisdiction before the potential respondent state has agreed to the jurisdiction of the court and the court will not have jurisdiction to hear the case on that moment. But the registry will, according to Article 38, paragraph 5 of the rules, the registry transmits the application to the state against which it is made. And it is then up to that state to consent, or not, to the jurisdiction of the court for the purpose of that case. And pending such consent, the case is not put on the general list of the court. When a state against which the application was made consents to the court's jurisdiction, it becomes respondent in the case. And the court jurisdiction extends to its consent. And usually such consent is explicit. But one can, for instance, imagine that it could result from the filing of a written pleading or from willingly taking part in the procedure. And this way of accepting the court's jurisdiction is called Forum Prorogatum. And it has been successfully used in two cases initiated by, respectively, Djibouti and Congo against France, the later case being discontinued at the request of the Congo. Let us turn now to Compromissary Clause, or Jurisdictional Clause, as a way to express consent to the jurisdiction of the court. And this is for the next video.