Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Victoria University of Wellington Law Review

Abstract

The call for papers that yielded the fascinating essays collected in this journal explained the interest in this subject as arising from the confluence of two facts: the increase in the number of countries around the world now governed by some form of "democracy" and the rising levels of international forms of regulation that purport to affect a broad range of issues within such nations. The call for papers suggested that these two developments made it "inevitable" that international lawyers should now be addressing whether international law and institutions are "democratic." The first fact is put in concrete terms in the opening sentences of Craig Forcese's contribution, in which he indicates the substantial increase in the percentage of the world's peoples living in electoral democracies since the end of the Cold War. The second development is ably demonstrated by the range of subject matter canvassed by this symposium. Contemporary international law's widening normative aspirations are suggested by the essays in this symposium, which address not only the traditional topics of war and peace, national security, or refugee status but include topics once regarded as within the exclusive "domestic jurisdiction" of states – such as decisions to preserve historic sites, to engage in environmental decisionmaking, how best to respect the rights of minorities, women, or homosexuals, or even interpret one's national constitution. While the impetus for this symposium is the perceived "democratic" gap between national and international forms of lawmaking, its organisers did not presume that democracies were more likely to comply with international law than other regimes. Our premise was only that democratic polities were generating greater (or at least more public) forms of backlash against ever more intrusive forms of international law. The call for papers suggested that democratic societies "are more apt to question whether international legal obligations, both treaty based or customary, are sufficiently 'accountable' or 'transparent.'" The starting proposition was that international law was increasingly seen as "vertically challenged," that is, subject to various forms of "democratic deficits" as compared to democratic lawmaking "below" it at the national level.

First Page

159

DOI

https://doi.org/10.26686/vuwlr.v38i2.5525

Volume

38

Publication Date

2007

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