Vierucci, Luisa --- "NGOs Before International Courts and Tribunals" [2008] ELECD 149; in Dupuy, Pierre-Marie; Vierucci, Luisa (eds), "NGOs in International Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: NGOs in International Law

Editor(s): Dupuy, Pierre-Marie; Vierucci, Luisa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847205605

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: NGOs Before International Courts and Tribunals

Author(s): Vierucci, Luisa

Number of pages: 26

Extract:

5. NGOs before international courts
and tribunals
Luisa Vierucci

INTRODUCTION
Access to justice may be seen as one of the major components, together with
access to information and access to decision making, of the relations between
intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and civil society.1 This element of the
relationship has become increasingly crucial by reason of the proliferation of
international courts and tribunals that we have been witnessing in the last 15
years. While international justice was until recently a prerogative of states,
with the limited exception of some human rights treaties granting legal status
to individuals, the last decade of the twentieth century saw not only the estab-
lishment of new international jurisdictions of a universal character (such as the
International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal
Court (ICC)), but also tribunals with limited ratione temporis jurisdiction
(such as the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR)) as well as experimental hybrid courts such
as the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Judicial proliferation coupled with enhanced international public participa-
tion calls for a re-assessment of the interrelationship between international
judicial bodies and that part of civil society which is represented by NGOs.2
The chapter starts with a pragmatic approach, namely, enquiring whether
NGOs are satisfied with the access to justice they are currently experiencing,
and only after such a démarche does it elaborate on the desirability eventually


1 These are the three areas in which the rights ...