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The Monetary Gold Principle

Publication at Faculty of Law |
2023

Abstract

The International Court of Justice defined the so-called Monetary Gold Principle already decades ago. Yet, the principle remains one of the most controversial issues. It states that a claim raised by parties to a dispute (in contentious proceedings if in front of the ICJ) may be declared inadmissible if there is a third state whose legal interests in the claim form the very subject-matter of the claim itself. The subsequent case law of the court (and other international judicial mechanisms whose jurisdiction is based on consensual basis) has failed up until now to clarify the exact contours of the principle. As a consequence, it suffers from heavy criticism and if it continues to be interpreted conservatively, it may form a serious obstacle to the functioning of the international dispute settlement judicial mechanisms.

Consequently, the principle should be interpreted in a way that will allow for a combination of the principle's maintenance anf functioning of the judicial bodies applying it. Such way is opened due to the fact that the principle was never found explicitly present in the applicable law, it was rather developed as its interpretative result. Using evolutive interpretation of international law, the article suggests, the above-mentioned conbination is possible and needed.