International Law in Domestic Courts

At present, the role of national courts in the context of the international legal order is significantly gaining importance since the relationship between domestic and international law is increasingly exemplified by domestic instances. Further, the extent to which domestic courts apply the rules of international law may well determine the effectiveness of international legal materials. Consequently, more and more academics and practitioners need access to domestic decisions involving international law. The current project is aimed to respond to these new developments by the establishment of a comprehensive online database including cases adjudicated by domestic courts dealing with aspects of international law. Relevant cases will be presented in a user-friendly way, comprising inter alia different search options (according to key categories and keywords) as well as commentaries on each case. Due to an outstanding international scientific co-operation, including academics from leading international institutions in Washington D.C., Amsterdam, Pretoria, Vienna and other renowned universities, careful analysis of the cases as well as wide geographical coverage are ensured while simultaneously allowing to comparatively assess the diverging approaches among participating jurisdictions.

The project "International law in domestic courts" has analysed the existing national case law relating to international law in a systematic way. While domestic court decisions are indeed relevant as a source of international law, judges on the national level regularly face the problem to obtain reliable evidence of international law, and especially customary law, on a specific aspect. Moreover, they might want to obtain more information on the application of a given international agreement, whether or not fully incorporated into the domestic legal order. The project responded to this requirement as it rests on a carefully annotated compilation of domestic cases decided by national courts dealing with international law in the form of a comprehensive online-database which is aimed at covering all major legal systems. In order to accomplish the standard processing of each case irrespective of its origin, a template has been devised which allows to quickly assess relevant elements of each case which is of particular importance in the light of user-friendly quality of the online database. Compared to traditional case reports in print, the advantages of this online-compilation are the rapid accessibility of decisions and the improved search-features which will facilitate the identification of relevant decisions in the field of public international law. Quick accessibility is of crucial importance, notably in the legal field with strict deadlines to be kept. The project has pooled research expertise necessary for secondary analysis. Ultimately, these efforts have significantly boosted the accessibility of academic research in a number of fields allowing for the further development of international law. The most important scientific advances of the project thus consist of the publication of the book "Challenging Acts of International Organizations Before National Courts" with the Publisher Oxford University Press (September 2010). On more than 300 pages, it retraces national court decisions dealing with a particularly interesting aspect of the inter-relationship between international and domestic law, i.e. the material challenge of acts of different international organizations by national instances. Through the particularly ambitious work of the courts of several jurisdictions such as Belgium or Italy this particular subject matter is considered to be one of the most quickly evolving fields of international law. Other topical examples of scientific output that build on the cases processed in the course of the project include a substantial contribution entitled "International Financial Institutions before National Courts", which forms a chapter of the book "International Financial Institutions and International Law" (edited by Daniel Bradlow and David Hunter, Kluwer Law, October 2010). This project intensified international cooperation and further deepened the links of the University of Vienna to other universities, thus contributing to the overall significance of Vienna as a leading research institution.