The International Court of Justice, international humanitarian law and human rights law

The ICJ is usually perceived as the world’s preeminent authority in matters of international law. As such, its judgments and advisory opinions have a crucial role towards identifying the content of the law. Over the years, the Court has had a number of opportunities to make statements on humanitarian law, human rights or both. This chapter identifies and analyses two relevant strains in the Court’s jurisprudence on these questions: first, its case-law on the ‘elementary considerations of humanity’, binding norms whose provenance the ICJ never clearly establishes; and second, its deliberations on the interplay between IHL and HRL in situations of armed conflict, where the Court employs an unusual understanding of lex specialis to describe the relationship between the two bodies of law. In spite of the Court’s often ambiguous approach, there exists sufficient clarity in its dicta to draw straightforward conclusions regarding issues of practical relevance