International Obligations Concerning Disarmament and the Cessation of the Nuclear Arms Race: Justiciability over Justice in the Marshall Islands Cases at the International Court of Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The International Court of Justice rulings in cases from the Marshall Islands against India, Pakistan and the UK not only failed to answer important questions regarding obligations to negotiate a nuclear cessation treaty and to disarm, but also raise new questions relating to the existence of a dispute under general international law. The Respondents objected to the Court’s jurisdiction to hear the case on the grounds that there was no justiciable dispute between them and the Marshall Islands, arguing that the issues should not be adjudicated within this forum. The Court agreed, finding there was not sufficient evidence of a dispute, per se, and consequently did not have jurisdiction to hear these cases on their merits as the Respondents were not aware of contentious issues. In the case of the UK, in particular, it was decided by a narrow majority, raising important questions about the Court’s strictly formalistic, and more importantly, unprecedented, approach regarding the existence of a dispute under international law. More significantly, the ruling avoided answering important questions relating to long-standing international obligations regarding disarmament and negotiations toward a treaty to cease the arms race pursuant to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 1968. This article provides an overview and analysis of the Marshall Islands cases, examining the main legal issues and arguments, focusing on the Court’s reasoning and highlighting the division within the Court on substantive matters pertaining to obligations of nuclear-armed states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".