[法律资料]【国际习惯法的识别】METHODS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF CUSTOMARY.pdfVIP

METHODS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE’S JURISPRUDENCE: 2000–2009 A ´ LBERTO ALVAREZ-JIMENEZ * ‘Sometimes the most important historical events are the non-events: the things that did not occur,’ says the British historian Niall Ferguson.1 Such a state- ment may well describe in large measure the International Court of Justice’s case-law regarding the methods for the identification of rules of customary international law during the period 2000–2009. The previous two decades had been marked by two milestones in this domain: the eighties by the judgment on the merits in Nicaragua,2 and the nineties by the Court’s advisory opinion in Nuclear Weapons .3 There was, though, no single decision by the Court of comparative significance regarding methods of customary international law during the first decade of the new millennium. Further, some of the most important determinations in this domain were those in which the Court did not declare the existence of a customary international rule. However, this is not to say that the above-mentioned conclusion applies to all of the Court’s juris- prudence related to customary international law. The conclusion is limited to the Court’s decisions regarding the methods for the recognition of norms of this character. In fact, the Court made very important pronouncements as to the content of customary international law in many domains, such as the use of force, territorial occupation, diplomatic protection, and international humanitarian law. Nor should this generalization obscure the somehow paradoxical richness— in conceptual terms—of the Court’s jurisprudence in this field, which emerges when assessing its dec