Today the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the United Nations hierarchy, ruled by a vote of 13-2 that “the Russian Federation shall immediately suspend military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine.” (The Russian and Chinese judges dissented.) The majority opinion concluded that there was no evidence substantiating Russia’s stated reason for the invasion, which was that Ukraine was committing genocide against Russian-speaking peoples in eastern Ukraine.
Under the UN Charter, the Court’s rulings are binding on the parties, and the Court has stated that they create “binding legal obligations” on the parties. The article linked above notes, however, that Vladimir Putin is nevertheless “unlikely” to abide by the order and cease the murderous invasion of Ukraine, and the Court has no standing army it can hurl into the fray, or any other means of enforcing its ruling. It’s entirely predictable that the Russians will ignore the order and undoubtedly will issue propaganda seeking to undercut the credibility of the Court and depict the judges as stooges of the imperialist West.
Presumably everyone understood this at the outset, and the Ukrainians nevertheless thought that the effort was worth it, if only to further evidence the barbaric and lawless actions of the Putin regime. I’m not sure that the decision is a very positive thing for the ICJ, however, because it is not good for courts to issue orders that they know will never be enforced or enforceable. A record of unenforceable orders undercuts the credibility of the court and can only serve to encourage noncompliance with other orders in the future. The Russian actions in the Ukraine are so heinous that the ICJ apparently decided to go ahead and issue the order, regardless.
The situation reminds me of an incident I learned about in law school. In 1832 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Worcester v. Georgia, issued a decision about Georgia’s rights with respect to Cherokee tribal lands. President Andrew Jackson strongly disagreed with the decision and famously stated: “John Marshall (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Because both the President and the state of Georgia basically ignored the ruling, it had no effect, and the terrible “Trail of Tears,” in which Cherokees were forced to relocate to Oklahoma at the cost of thousands of Native American lives, was the ultimate result. It took decades for the Court’s credibility to recover to the position it now occupies, where the public outcry if an American President ignored a Supreme Court ruling would quickly make the President’s position unsustainable.
Unfortunately, Russia is not the United States, and the ICJ does not have the same implicit authority in Russia that the U.S. Supreme Court has in our country. The ICJ’s ruling today is undoubtedly correct, and it provides another reason to steadfastly oppose Vladimir Putin’s egregious activities in the Ukraine–but it will be up to history to determine whether the impact of Putin’s flouting of the order on the International Court of Justice’s credibility, and on parties’ compliance with its future orders, was worth it.
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