Lecture summary: The current (and intensely fought) dispute over the ICC's jurisdiction in Palestine raises some interesting doctrinal and theoretical issues in international law, such as how Palestine can be considered a State for purposes of the Rome Statute while having not attained full independence or external self-determination.Once one places the ICC properly within the broader universe of international legal order, and applies the treaty interpretation principles of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, objections to jurisdiction that seem at first glance powerful, such as that Palestine is not really a State, are revealed to be on quite shaky ground.
Professor Robert Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU School of Law. Professor Howse received his B.A. in philosophy and political science with high distinction, as well as an LL.B., with honours, from the University of Toronto, where he was co-editor in chief of the Faculty of Law Review. He also holds an LL.M. from the Harvard Law School. He has been a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne), Tsinghua University, and Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and taught in the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence.
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