One of the most noted developments in international law over the past twenty years is the proliferation of international courts and tribunals. They decide who has the right to exploit natural resources, define the scope of human rights, delimit international boundaries and determine when the use of force is prohibited. As the number and influence of international courts grow, so too do challenges to their legitimacy. This volume provides new interdisciplinary insights into international courts' legitimacy: what drives and undermines the legitimacy of these bodies? How do drivers change depending on the court concerned? What is the link between legitimacy, democracy, effectiveness and justice? Top international experts analyse legitimacy for specific international courts, as well as the links between legitimacy and cross-cutting themes. Failure to understand and respond to legitimacy concerns can endanger both the courts and the law they interpret and apply.

2.2 Procedural Rules and Issues

With the ad hoc tribunals completing their mandates and the International Criminal Court under significant pressure, today's international criminal jurisdictions are at a critical juncture. Their legitimacy cannot be taken for granted. This multidisciplinary volume investigates key issues pertaining to legitimacy: criminal accountability, normative development, truth-discovery, complementarity, regionalism, and judicial cooperation. The volume sheds new light on previously unexplored areas, including the significance of redacted judgements, prosecutors' opening statements, rehabilitative processes of international convicts, victim expectations, court financing, and NGO activism. The book's original contributions will appeal to researchers, practitioners, advocates, and students of international criminal justice, accountability for war crimes and the rule of law.

There has been intense debate in recent times over the legitimacy or otherwise of international law. This book contains fresh perspectives on these questions, offered at an international and interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and International Law. At issue are questions including, for example, whether international law lacks legitimacy in general and whether international law or a part of it has yielded to the facts of power.

Evaluates the fundamental legitimacy of judicial practice in the growing number of environmental cases heard before international courts.

Investigates the legitimacy of 'unseen actors' (e.g. registries, experts) through an enquiry into international courts' and tribunals' composition and practice.

This book provides a critical legal perspective on the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals. The volume offers a critique of ideology of two legal approaches to the legitimacy of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) that portray it as a supranational tribunal whose last say on human rights protection has a transformative effect on the democracies of Latin America. The book shows how the discussion between these Latin American legal strands mirrors global trends in the study of the legitimacy of international courts related to the use of constitutional analogies and concepts such as the notion of judicial dialogue and the idea of democratic transformation. It also provides an in-depth analysis of how, through the use of those categories, legal experts studying the legitimacy of the IACtHR enact self-validation processes by making themselves the principal agents of transformation. These self-validation processes work as ideological apparatuses that reproduce and entrench the mindset that the legal discipline is a driving force of change in itself. Further, the book shows how profiling the Court as an agent of transformation diverts attention from the ways in which it has pursued a particular view of human rights and democracy in the region that creates and reproduces relations of inequality and domination. Rather than discarding the IACtHR, this book aims to de-centre the focus away from formal legal institutions, engaging with the idea that ordinary people can mobilise and define the content of law to transform their lives and territories. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars working in the areas of human rights law, law, public international law, legal theory, constitutional law, political science and legal philosophy.