The Judicial Self-Government at the International Level — A New Research Agenda

The phenomenon of judicial self-government at international courts has thus far been vastly understudied. Our article fills this gap and systematically explores its personal dimension, both from formal and informal perspectives. Specifically, we focus on the selection, promotion, and removal of international judges. We build our analysis on studying legal instruments, such as constitutive treaties, statutes, and rules of procedure, which we subsequently supplement by anecdotal evidence of how they work in practice. We show that each international court is unique in terms of the forms and extent of participation of its judges in deciding on international judicial careers. There is a variation as regards the forms and degree of judicial self-government across international courts and across the relevant areas of decision-making for each court. However, some broader patterns and trends emerge from our examination of relevant provisions and practices. First, some courts display consistently low degrees of judicial self-government across all these areas of decision-making, while other courts display relatively higher degrees. Second, judicial self-government does not manifest itself at the international level in entirely the same way as it does at the national level. We found that while judicial self-government manifests itself relatively strongly in the areas of promotions and removals of international judges, it is limited in the area of selection of international judges. International courts are not, strictly speaking, self-governing in the latter area, because the sitting judges of these courts are rarely members of the bodies that decide or advise on selecting new judges. However, sitting judges of some international courts have become involved in the formation of the bodies screening candidates and/or in selecting the members of such bodies. Hence, judicial self-government has started manifesting itself in selection processes internationally, albeit in a limited fashion, with only indirect involvement of sitting international judges