 Rhaid o bobl yn bwrdd y ichi roi eu gyllid fel gwaith ar gyfer y ffordd fel y cyfryd. Rydym wedi'u llyfr yn ganodd, fel y gallai ni'n gweithio ar derbyn y cair cyfarthade, y cyfarfyr Cymru, ac mae'r unrhyw frawr hyn yn adeiladol y phirgyrch,au yma i gynhyrchu ar dweud ac yn adeilad ar gyfer o gwir y cyfroedd Cymru, yn ychydig ar gyfer y ffordd ac yn gweld, ddwy dechrau, yng Nghoddol y maen nhw. Felly, mae'r maen nhw yma i wneud at y cwestiynau gyda'r cyfrwyryn, o gweithio eich gwirionedd yn bwysig yw'r website www.cliffarcharms.com.com. And stay up to date by following them on Twitter at cc grads.uk. I'm now here at Argymd bros yw sydd ymlaen i'r sgifreig ar y cyfnod. Good evening everyone. Today I have the privilege of introducing our guests and very own alumnist, the Christopher Greenwood. So Christopher Greenwood has been a judge of the Iran United States claims tribunal and international arbitrator since March 2018. Prior to his appointment to the tribunal he was a judge of the International Court of Justice in 2009 to February 2018. Before his election to the court he was professor of international law at the London School of Economics and a practising barrister who regularly argued cases about international law before international and English courts. So Christopher was educated at Raven Park School of Singapore, Wellingborough School and Moreden College Cambridge where he obtained degrees in law in international law with first class honours and was elected a fellow of Moreden College Cambridge in 1978. He taught at Cambridge for nearly 20 years before being appointed to a chair of international law at the London School of Economics in 1996. Publications include over 100 volumes of the international law reports, a collection of essays and numerous articles. He was appointed Queen's Council in 1999, made a companion of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to public international law in 2002 and knighted in 2009. In June 2018 he was appointed Night Grand Cross for services to international justice in Her Majesty the Queen's birthday honours list. He was an honoree fellow of Moreden College and of the Last Park Centre for International Law and an associate of the Institute of Drive International. Without further ado, please drive me and welcome in, Sir Christopher. Well thank you very much for that kind introduction and for the invitation to come and speak this evening. It's actually rather nice to be home. I think I gave the last lecture that I gave in Cambridge in this lecture room some 22 years ago but my association with Cambridge goes much further back than that. I came up as an undergraduate to read law 45 years ago. Of course we weren't in this rather nice building in those days. Lectures were held in the Mill Lane lecture rooms. One of the bleakest buildings you could possibly imagine. Well they're not quite as bleak as the ones that Oxford used to use. The first time I examined a deep fill at Oxford, the examination which I was told was a public examination that anyone could attend, perhaps wisely no member of the public actually chose to attend it, was held in a windowless basement room with three upright chairs, no table, and a light that had no shade, just a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. A hardened KGB interrogator might have thought it was a bit lacking in the ordinary creature comforts. Anyway I'm very grateful to you all for turning out this evening to come and listen to me. I remember that when I was a student the idea of going and listening to some old buffer, a retired judge or whoever coming back to tell war stories about his own days at Cambridge, was not perhaps always quite as tempting as the old buffer might have wished. Now I'm an old buffer myself. I will try not to spend too much time talking to you about the age when dinosaurs still wandered up and down King's Parade. That's not incidentally a reference to the older members of the Regent House before the debate there. Now my subject tonight is litigating international law. My experience as a litigator was that for many years I was counseled in cases both in national and international courts about international law and I'd been a judge and an arbitrator in a variety of different international tribunals. But let me say that the first and most important lesson about litigation is the main job of a lawyer is to avoid it. You need to keep your clients out of court if you possibly can because going to court is unpredictable and it is invariably very expensive. And one of the things that I think is a weakness of the way that we tend to teach law in universities particularly in common law jurisdictions is because we necessarily focus on cases to a large extent. We can easily give you the impression that what goes on in court is the entirety or at least the most important aspect of what law is all about. It isn't, it matters, but it has to be seen in its proper context. A practising international lawyer in a foreign ministry will spend far more time on the negotiation of treaties, on diplomatic exchanges than they are ever going to spend on court work. However, having said that, courts are my subject this evening and those courts are both international courts of which there is now a rich variety and also national domestic courts and tribunals. And I want to say a little bit about the way each of them handles international law. But first, let's have a bit of history. I want to take you back 150 years to the Alabama dispute between the United States and the United Kingdom because although it's not the first international law case it is in many ways the most important. Now the background in case you're not familiar with it is that during the US Civil War almost the entirety of the United States Navy opted to support the North, so the Confederacy was desperately weak at sea. At the 1863 Confederate agents in London commissioned the building in Liverpool of two very fast ships, the Alabama and the Florida. They were supposedly merchant vessels, but in fact if you looked at the plans they were far faster than any merchant ship of the time. They had no cargo holds, but they did have lots of interesting holes or ports which were ideally suited to the cannons that warships of the time used. And they were obviously designed as commerce raiders. Now the United States government in Washington got wind of this. Approached the British government and said, look, in 1861 when this conflict started you proclaimed yourselves neutral which we regarded as an extreme impermanence because neutrality doesn't apply in a rebellion. You insisted that the South had to be treated as a belligerant and now you can jolly well put your money where your mouth is and apply the duties of a neutral state to stop these warships being built in your territory. And the British government's reaction to that was to do what any sensible government should do. It went to a lawyer. It went to Sir John Hammond who was the Queen's advocate. In those days there were three law officers. The Queen's advocate was the senior of the three with the Attorney General and the Solicitor General being junior to him. And they sent the papers to Hammond for Hammond's advice about whether there was a duty to stop the ships from sailing and whether the British government had the power to stop them from leaving. The only problem with this was that Hammond had gone mad. He was quite literally wandering around the gardens of his country house talking to his daffodils. His wife had covered this up so that nobody knew he had lost his mind. The result was that the papers sat on his desk unopened for about a month. When the British government realised something was wrong they got the papers back and the days before faxes and photocopiers because there was only the one set of them. And a new lawyer gave advice which was to say for God's sake stop these ships from sailing but by then it was too late. The Confederates knew what was happening. They sailed the ships with part of the construction work unfinished. Fitted them out with firearms outside Barbados and they both had a spectacular record in sinking and capturing union shipping for the next 12 months. The Alabama in particular sank a greater tonnage of shipping than any U-boat managed to do in either World War I or World War II. It did immense damage to the US merchant fleet from which in many ways that fleet never recovered. And the Alabama eventually having sailed around the world was sunk by a US frigate nine miles off the French port of Sherbourg. The American captain having sent message to the captain of the Alabama inviting him to come out for a trial of arms and promising him that if any other US warship showed up the captain of the KSA would order it not to take part in the conflict so that it would be a fair battle. We don't do things quite like that nowadays. Incidentally the Alabama which sank in the conflict is still making history because nine miles outside Sherbourg was of course in the high seas in 1863 but it's now in French territorial waters. So there's been a long running argument about whether France or the United States owns the shipwreck. Be that as it may, when the civil war was over the United States demanded compensation for the damage done by the Alabama and the Florida. The British government said well we had no legal obligation to stop these ships from leaving but even if under international war we did there was no power under British law to stop them from sailing. Now tempers got very high indeed. You have to remember at this stage Britain was wealthier than the United States. It had a far bigger navy. It was the bigger more powerful state. Except that it had a 3,000 mile border between the British Dominion of Canada and the United States and 10,000 British soldiers to guard it. The United States Army at the time was still being demobilized and it was about half a million strong. So locally the power rested with the United States and there were plenty of people in the US willing to go to war over this issue. In one debate in the US Senate it was suggested by a Republican senator that Britain should be required to hand over Canada and its colonies in the West Indies as part payment for the damage done by the Alabama and the Florida. Justingly no mention was made of the views of the Canadians or the West Indians but that would have been irrelevant in the world of those days. This was opposed by another Republican senator who said Britain was going to lose Canada and the West Indies anyway. Manifest destiny, the concept that America had a right to rule from one ocean to the other would mean the Americans would get Canada and the West Indies in due course in any event. So why should the British get a discount on the damages? Simply by handing over territories that were going to be America's one day in any case. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, the case went to arbitration. Now then you need to look at the American claim. It wasn't just for the direct damage done by the two ships. It was for the entire cost of the last 15 months of the American Civil War. In today's money probably about one and a half to two trillion US dollars. So we're talking here large litigation sums. It went to an arbitration tribunal in Geneva of five members, one nominated by the Americans. Interestingly today he wouldn't have been entitled to sit. It was a man called Adams, the ambassador who had negotiated the agreement to arbitrate. He was a politician. His father had been president of the United States. His grandfather had been president of the United States. Even better pedigre than being a Clinton or a Bush. The British nominated Sir Alexander Coban, the Chief Justice at the time. Coban was fluent in French and German so he was quite a good choice. Unfortunately he had the most unpleasant personality in Britain at the time. He was the only Chief Justice not to be made a peer because Queen Victoria disapproved of his private life. He had seduced one of her ladies in waiting for them on the stage. He fatally refused to speak to the other members of the arbitration tribunal at times and above all he thought the case was going to settle so he didn't read the papers until it was much too late. This incidentally is a mistake which many barristers made today. Never believe it when your client says settlement is in the offing, don't spend a lot of time on the papers, you can be horribly caught out on that first day in court. In the end, the other three members of the tribunal by the way were a former president of Switzerland, an Italian aristocrat and a Brazilian count. First time you've had two judges from the new world sitting in a case of this kind. They very skillfully found in favour of America on the law but then held they didn't have jurisdiction to consider the indirect damages claim and they awarded 15.5 million US dollars as damages. That today would be about 250 million so it's again a substantial award. The British paid immediately by handing over part of their stock of US treasury bonds which tells you a lot about the UK's wealth in the 1870s. Now why is the case important? It's important because it taught a very valuable lesson that you could settle a really acrimonious dispute of this kind by going to arbitration rather than by going to war. And it had a dramatic effect on Anglo-American relations. Those relations had been scratching at best ever since American independence. There had been one short war between the two countries in 1812 to 1814 and a number of cases where war seemed likely. After the Alabama dispute the poison was drawn from that relationship and I think it's no exaggeration to say that the very strong alliances between Britain and America in World War I and World War II would not have been possible if the Alabama dispute had festered on for 30 or 40 years as it could easily have done. And it gave the idea that maybe we needed a standing court to hear cases on international law. And that led to the permanent court of arbitration at the beginning of the 20th century, the permanent court of international justice after the First World War and the international court of justice after the Second World War. Now that's the background in international law and it suggests that right from the end of the 19th century you've got this unstoppable progress towards greater international adjudication. That is not what happened. When I did what is now the LLM in international law here in 1977 the position was very different from what you might have expected. The international court of justice at the time had one case on its books and it decided just after I'd done my exams that it didn't have jurisdiction to hear that. Arbitration was almost unknown. The only big contemporary arbitration was the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile in which a Cambridge educated lawyer had produced a superb intellectual award which neither country was satisfied with. They went to the brink of war and the dispute ended up being resolved by papal mediation, a generous offer on behalf of the Pope at the time which caused consternation in the Vatican because they hadn't done a mediation for well over 100 years and there were very inadequate records of how to do it. Human rights, you could fit the entire jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights into a single volume and there were no other human rights tribunals. And as for the position in national courts well I think the position in Britain at least was summed up by one English judge a few years later incidentally who said, ah international law, yes I know about that. English law is law, foreign law is fact, international law is fiction. And then it all changed again. If you look at the situation today the ICJ has 17 cases on its docket which may not seem a lot but if you keep in mind that only states can be litigants and there are only 193 states many of which don't accept the jurisdiction of the court. 17 cases is a considerable load six of those have been filed in the nine months since I left the court. Moreover, although some of them are about disputes that I think you'd have to regard as the byways of international relations have you ever heard of the Iapoteos? The Iapoteos sits at the mouth of the San Juan River on the boundary between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. It's about three and a half square kilometres in size. It has been the subject of three cases in the ICJ during the nine years that I was on the court. My first case was about the river San Juan and the island. My last case was about the river San Juan and the island. Three and a half square kilometres means it's about the size of the Sidwix site plus Newnham College. But whereas the Sidwix site has this beautiful building and that award-winning eyesaw that the history faculty has the Iapoteos is uninhabitable swampland. By my estimate it would have been cheaper for the two countries to pave it in solid gold than pay the fees that they ended up paying litigating over it. But there are a lot of other cases that are much more obviously of central importance. The Bolivia Chile case where judgement was given at the beginning of this month, the president of Bolivia attended the hearings in person. The Chilean cabinet were told they had to come into the foreign ministry to watch the live broadcast, even though that meant arriving at five o'clock in the morning given the time difference between the Hague and Santiago. The recent Iran-US case has caused pandemonium in relations between two countries whose relations are less than good anyway. The Chagos Islands advisory case goes to the heart of issues raised by British decolonisation and the two cases involving Qatar and its neighbours concern one of the most acrimonious disputes in the Middle East. The Iran United States claims tribunal where I'm now a judge and incidentally I am an American judge on the Iran-US claims tribunal do not be confused by my accent in that regard. The tribunal consists of three American appointments, three Iranian appointees and three third country members and I was appointed to fill a vacancy when one of the American arbitrators died very suddenly in February of this year. But that tribunal, which has existed since the hostage crisis was resolved in 1981, has given out awards of well over two billion US dollars to Clavance against Iran and is currently hearing some enormous claims by the Iranian State against the United States mostly to do with Iranian property in the US that was frozen in 1979 or armed contracts between the two countries concluded in the 1970s. So now as a grandfather in my 60s I am trying to work out what contracts meant that were negotiated when I was still a university student or in some cases still at school. Incidentally, there can be problems in cases between two countries like Iran and the United States. In 2016, the Obama administration settled out of court a claim for something like three quarters of a billion dollars plus interest, about two billion all told. It was a prudent settlement to make. The tribunal gave an award on agreed terms and only then was it realised that the money could not be paid through the banking system because of financial sanctions. In the end, it was paid by the United States transferring the money to the Dutch central bank. It was drawn out in cash in euros and taken around in a van to the Iranian embassy in the Hague. Such are the difficulties that international litigation can give rise to. International criminal law which was completely unknown when I was a student. There was no course in it, nobody even thought to mention it. Is now a reality with the International Criminal Court and I think even more important the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It's worth remembering that the ICTY eventually got custody of every single defendant that is indicted despite the absence of an international police force and the only people whose trials were not concluded were those like Milosevic who died while the trial was taking place. Human rights, as well as the European Court you have the UN Human Rights Committee a plethora of special committees like the Committee Against Torture the Inter-American Court and Commission of Human Rights the African Court of Human and People's Rights and those between them have made I think an enormous difference in often in relation to matters that today we would find it incredible to see that the international criminal ever went to court. When I was a university student here a man was released from the local secure mental hospital where he had been detained for the previous 35 years. The crime for which he was incarcerated in the first place was the theft of a bicycle in Cambridge city centre in the 1930s. The idea that somebody was simply left to rot under the Mental Health Act by a judgement of the European Court of Human Rights the idea that a prisoner can correspond with their lawyer without the governor being able to not only read but also censor that correspondence is the product of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The transformation that they brought about is extraordinary. In arbitration you not only have now an enormous list of interstate arbitrations you have some 50 to 100 cases a year being brought by investors against the state in which they have invested under the ICSID Convention or under one of the other agreements about investor state protection. And national courts the transformation in this country was extraordinary from the late 1980s and international law's fiction by the early 2000s you had a court of appeal deciding on the precise nature of the powers of a bulletin document in connection with cases brought about the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And I once did a case against Lord Lloyd Jones as he now is from the Supreme Court who's lecturing at the Lauterpacht centre I think at the end of this week or the end of next. And that case concerned a motor insurance bureau claim against the United States where I successfully argued that the United States had sovereign immunity and may say it was my only victory over David Lloyd Jones who was an old friend of mine from our Cambridge days he roundly beat me twice more in the following two years and when he went to the bench shortly afterwards I wrote him a letter of congratulations saying all I can hope now I cannot get my revenge in court is that you're humiliating the overturned by the court of appeal on at least two occasions but he never was. At the end of that case the Supreme Court Deputy Master who had heard it said well gentlemen this has been a most interesting day quite different from what I normally do he had had cases from the ICJ and from at least five other countries cited before him do keep me in mind if you have any more work of this kind it's an illustration of just how quickly the culture changed in domestic courts now let me say a little bit about the differences in litigation in international and domestic environments first of all with an international court you have to remember that whatever type of court you're dealing with Iran, US, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court they are multinational courts the judges and the personnel come from a wide range of different countries and that creates a number of issues one of which is language now most of these courts work in two languages in the case of the ICJ it's English and French although almost all of the work is done in English in the Iran-US claims tribunal but it isn't necessarily English as English native speakers know it if you become an advocate in a court of that kind do make sure you avoid those complicated double negatives which the British love so much there's one report on humanitarian intervention published by a foreign office research team which concludes and the best case that can be made in favour of humanitarian intervention is that it cannot be said to be unambiguously illegal I watched an audience counting on their fingers trying to work out where that triple negative action came out it's worth remembering when you throw into conversation those sports metaphors of which we're so fond there are a lot of countries out there where they don't play cricket and they may not quite understand what you mean by a long stop let alone by bowling a googly or batting on a sticky wicket Incidentally, batting on a sticky wicket translates into French as Don LaPetran in the bread mix tells you all you need to know that the British talk about sport and the French immediately translate it into food but to make matters worse even if you talk about a sport that another country does play not every country uses sports metaphors in educated dialogue the way that the British, the Americans and the Australians tend to do and there are lots of other little tricks, words that we take for granted that don't actually work outside our own culture I heard the Solicitor General of Australia in the ICJ and I was a judge in one of those cases talk about something being a furfey Anybody know what a furfey is? Any Australians or New Zealanders hear you? Yes? Yeah, it's a tall story you'd have actually got it if you'd listened to it in French the French interpreter translated it as a canal apparently furfey was the man who invented the water coolers in the First World War and people stood around the water cooler telling tall stories to one another it didn't work at all as a common because none of us had the faintest idea what he was talking about or take a more serious legal issue if you look at the Middle East dispute between Israel and its neighbours you'll eventually come back to Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 which requires, amongst other things that Israel should withdraw from and I quote territories occupied in the recent conflict not the territories now there is a literature that would fill this room of writers arguing about whether the absence of the word the in that sentence meant that Israel did not have to withdraw from all of those territories but only from some of them now without entering into the question of what 242 actually meant you need to understand that that argument means nothing to somebody who is looking at the Russian or Chinese text of the resolution equally authentic with the English because there are no definite and indefinite articles in Chinese and there wouldn't be a definite or indefinite article in a sentence of that kind in Russian a Russian speaking person I knew very well once in a course of a conversation said was long debate in Russia before the war about whether Jews are people and I was completely taken aback by this until I realised from the context of what he was saying that he translated literally from the Russian what he meant was whether the Jews are a people for the purposes of self-determination very careful about making a mistake like that in advocacy a second point about the diversity in the court is that although gender diversity remains very weak in international tribunals you do get plenty of racial diversity and perhaps more importantly in practical terms a vast diversity in the background of the people who hear cases if you go into a court in this country you might get a court of appeal of one woman judge who went to Gertin a male judge who went to South London Polytechnic and a judge from an ethnic minority background who went to Oxford but the point is they were all barristers for 30 years before they became judges so they have a common professional background and a common understanding about how trial is conducted what happens in a court you won't get that in an international tribunal where very few of the judges were advocates before they became judges so where very often you will find that the president of the court was a former legal advisor to his own in his government's foreign ministry the vice president was from an international organisation the most senior judge had been an eminent professor who had never been in court now that diversity in my view is a source of strength not a source of weakness but it means that you do not have that background of assumptions you can make in English court or an American court or a French court about what is going on you have to have a much broader outlook in your advocacy than you would do in a domestic tribunal and take also the differences of procedure in the English systems we tend to regard the jury as being an important defender of the rights of the individual in America that's an article of faith one of my first cases was the Lockerbie dispute between Britain and America on the one side and Libya on the other which was eventually settled by Libya agreeing to transfer the two defendants who were wanted for the destruction of an aircraft and the deaths of over 300 people to trial before a special criminal court made up of Scottish judges who would sit in the Netherlands one of the things that came as a surprise particularly to the Americans in these negotiations is that the two defendants were adamant that they weren't going to stand trial in front of a jury because to them they saw a jury as a lynch mob of untrained people who would want to find them guilty as a way of doing something about a terrible terrorist outrage and that's a graphic illustration of how something that is regarded as a safeguard for the individual in one legal system is regarded completely differently by people who come from a different legal tradition. A second point to keep in mind about international courts is that their jurisdiction is largely based on the consent of the state's concern. If that consent isn't there there's no jurisdiction so that very often means that you have a lengthy dispute about whether the facts of the case actually fall within the jurisdiction clause that the claimant state is relying on and that can often produce what I call the Cinderella syndrome. Remember in the ffable of Cinderella the ugly sisters tried to squeeze their large size 45 feet into the size 25 glass slipper that Cyndas had been wearing. That's what you spend most of your time doing as counsel for a claimant state in international law or for an investor in investor state arbitration trying to squeeze the dispute into what is often a very small glass slipper in the form of the jurisdictional provision in the treaty that you're operating under. That's why if you read the cases you very often get the impression that the court is missing the real point. Why in the Croatia-Serbia and Bosnia-Serbia cases didn't the International Court of Justice recognise that there were serious violations of the Geneva Conventions? The answer is it didn't have jurisdiction to deal with that. The cases were brought under the genocide convention so only allegations of genocide could be considered. And lastly, you have to keep in mind the political environment in which a court, an international court operates. I've mentioned the settlement of that Iran-US case but imagine the difficulty of making the Iran-US tribunal work in its early years with the very acrimonious relations between the two countries. It reached its high point when two are between and tried to strangle a third in the foyer of the arbitration tribunal in the mid 1980s. I'm happy to say that nothing like that happens today. And lastly, what about enforcement of these judgments? Now many of you, particularly if you're undergraduates, may think well enforcement is the Achilles' heel of international law. You can't enforce a judgment after all, the United States has declined to give effect to the judgment on the death penalty in the Aveina case. Slightly complicated background. It was a supreme court judgment that led to that rather than a decision by the administration. Or you have the president of Argentina at the time saying that no ascent was going to be paid out to investors no matter what arbitration tribunals might say. Now there are two points to making response to that. The first is what I suspect you're not told in lectures on contract and tort. And I certainly wasn't told when I was a student here is that a lot of judgments of English courts don't get enforced either. You try going into court and getting an order that requires an estranged wife to let her ex-husband have access to their children. You'll get the order. Try enforcing it if the woman doesn't wish to comply. Or try enforcing a matrimonial exclusion order against a husband who doesn't wish to comply with it. And you'll find that you have a far greater task than you would ever have in enforcing a judgement of the International Court of Justice. If you buy a dodgy second hand car and it doesn't work are you entitled to damages? Yes. Will you actually collect on the award of damages? Probably not if the rather sleazy garage has gone into administration and funnily enough has popped up again with a very similar name much the same people but on a different site and with a different trading name. Enforcement is the achilles heel of every legal system not just of international law and the extraordinary thing is that almost every judgement of the International Court of Justice has been complied with. Sometimes the wait was a long one but it has been met in the end and incidentally Argentina did pay out on those investment arbitration awards. Now a very brief word about national courts before we finish and have some questions. It's worth remembering that even a national court that wants to apply international law and thinks it's applying international law is actually almost invariably applying something a bit different from what you get in the International Court of Justice. There are a number of reasons for that in an English court whatever international law might say the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy means that a statute will take priority although there are now certain workarounds in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights. But in the end the statute still takes primacy even if it can be declared to be incompatible with the European Convention. It can't be declared incompatible with other rules of international law even in states that don't have a rule about the primacy of statute usually the national constitution takes priority over anything whereas of course in international law you can't rely on any rule of your own domestic legal system to get out of your international legal obligations even the constitution takes second place. Precedent in a country that has such a system will often mean that the application of international law is extremely difficult I was an expert witness once in a case in New York and I was attacked by council for the other side because he attacked James Crawford as well the two of us were then professors we both written expert opinions the two British professors and I thought that's really antagonised James who's a proud Australian the two British professors have not cited any authority on second circuit international law let me break it to you there is no such thing as second circuit international law there is only international law but the effect of precedent and that kind of mindset on the part of lawyers often means that in practice when you're asked to prove a rule of international law in the national court you do it by going to domestic precedents have a look at the law on state immunity in this country as an example and finally you have the problem of culture and expertise it's not easy to work in international law if it's a system that you're not used to let me finish with one story one of the most difficult cases I had to argue as council was the case about General Pinochet the Chilean ex-president who was charged with various offences but primarily torture in the Spanish courts who then sought to extradite him from the UK now one of the issues that arose was whether there was a customary law rule of immunity for a state official or former official in relation to a charge of something like torture one of the arguments I put forward I was arguing that General Pinochet was not entitled to immunity one of the arguments I put forward is that if you looked there were dozens and dozens of cases in which state officials in one state had been prosecuted for criminal offences in another mostly espionage, murder, sabotage etc now the question I was asked from the bench was was the issue of immunity actually raised to which the answer is in almost every case no now of course if you look at that as a common lawyer thinking in terms of precedent if the issue wasn't raised the case isn't a precedent if you look at it as an international lawyer looking for state practice which gives rise to a rule of custom the very fact that the state in question didn't advance an argument of immunity to try and protect its official tells you a great deal that's an important piece of state practice in its own right and let me just quickly sum up international courts domestic courts applying international law are infinitely more important than they were 40 years ago they play a much greater role there is a vast body of jurisprudence they've given rise to that instantly is good news and bad news for newer students but bad news is there's an awful lot more to study than there used to be the good news is there are more job openings at the end of the degree course than you might have expected but I come back to where I started don't imagine that what is going on in the courts is the whole story in many respects it's not even the main part of the story it's just a much more interesting story than it was when I was a student thank you all very much