Governing International Justice: Whence the Unified Principles?

The governance of international courts and tribunals (ICTs) by states, international organisations or other entities has for a long time been the reserve of international civil servants, international courts' principals, and legal advisers in the embassies and in the capitals. At the instigation of Professor Niels Blokker, not least due to his coinage of the term injugovins (international judicial governance institutions) and his prolific contributions on the subject, this previously grey zone of international policy and practice has turned into a dynamic field of comparative and critical academic inquiry. Despite the diversity among the injugovins overseeing distinct types of ICTs in terms of legal status, organisational forms, and practical arrangements, the operation of the governance institutions raises the same normative questions and challenges across the board. The problems in the judicial governance practice have attested to the need for injugovins to respect and safeguard institutional judicial independence, provide courts with competent elected officials, conduct adequate financial and management oversight, and ensure timely and effective legislative and policy interventions. This chapter examines whether, despite the irreducible institutional divergence, the unified standards that (should) 'govern the governors' of ICTs have emerged and, if so, what their sources and normative contents might be.