2020/1 – L’interpretazione nel diritto internazionale

Se l’odierna teoria del diritto condivide l’orientamento secondo cui l’interpretazione costituisce un momento saliente per dar conto delle forme e dei modi della giuridicità, è possibile affermare fondatamente che l’attuale scenario del diritto internazionale conferma la centralità, per la sua stessa configurazione, delle attività interpretative che in esso si svolgono.
L’interpretazione nel diritto internazionale si colloca nel vasto panorama rappresentato dai processi di positivizzazione, pur presentando una serie di caratteristiche specifiche. È una pratica diffusa che vede coinvolti tutti i soggetti, i quali, nel contempo, interpretano e applicano le regole ad essi rivolte, e che contribuisce alla formazione e alla operatività di tali regole. L’ordinamento giuridico internazionale (i cui attori non sono più solo gli Stati, ma anche le varie organizzazioni internazionali, gli individui e i popoli) funziona così come viene interpretato.
Ma la assenza di un’autorità centrale fa sì che la comunità internazionale ricorra prevalentemente a meccanismi di auto-regolazione. In questo senso, il diritto internazionale si caratterizza come pratica di coordinazione spontanea delle interpretazioni dei soggetti coinvolti, che, in varie circostanze, realizzano differenti scopi e sviluppano diverse strategie.
Nello scenario mondiale magmatico, frammentato, il ruolo degli organi giurisdizionali o para-giurisdizionali diventa importante e produce un tendenziale, benché non facile, superamento della logica che vede gli Stati restii a farsi sfuggire l’auto-valutazione dei rispettivi interessi e l’auto-interpretazione del diritto.

This essay argues that international legal discourses, including in the interpretations ofinternational law that populate them, function as a deeply entrenched routinecomposed of a great variety of professional habits. This essay grapples with one ofthese shared habits constitutive of the routine of international lawyers, namely whatinternational lawyers refer to as ‘methods’. Methods, it is argued here, are among themost central of all the habits constitutive of the routine of international lawyers, in thatmethods help the routine to conceal what it does. More specifically, this essay claimsthat the methods deployed by international lawyers enshroud international legaldiscourses with both novelty and vulnerability, thereby camouflaging the tragedy andcynicism of the routine of international lawyers. The essay ends with a few remarks onwhat a counter-routine methodology could look like.

The article discusses two main theses. The first one is the presence and forms of therule of law in the international legal scenario. This task is developed through the analysisof three possible versions: the extension of the domestic rule of law to the obligationscoming from international law, the rule of international law, and the internationalrule of law. The second thesis is that the rule of law plays a role in theinterpretation of law. This role depends on legal science, considered the crucialresource of an international law of international lawyers. The final point regards thenthe relationships between international rule of law and legal science, and, in particular,the answering to the question about the features of a legal science able to foster the ruleof law.

Although international judgments are formally binding only for the parties and for theparticular case, judicial interpretation is critical to the development of internationallaw. A creative role is inherent to the exercise of the judicial function also at the domesticlevel; however, this phenomenon is enhanced by the specific features of the internationallegal order, where the authoritativeness of ‘judge-made lawà �� ultimately relies onthe ability of international courts and tribunals to identify solutions that are acceptableto their constituencies.

In order to face the phenomenon of judicial globalization and the internationalization of human rights and to bring the plurality of jurisdictional remedies back to a tendency to unity, the jurisprudential scenario is characterized by the cooperation between internal and supranational jurisdictions, in the forms of  “dialogue between the Courts”. The use of coordination practices to prevent any hermeneutic antinomies becomes central. Through the contamination of best practices, behavioral models,registers of language, techniques of argumentation and style of decisions, they are forming in the community of jurists, through authoritative “precedents”, a European nomofilachia and ius commune.The essay also analyzes a case of failure of the “dialogue between the Courts” (the Italian Supreme Court and Constitutional Court vs the International Court of Justice), about limits to the functional immunity of the State for war crimes and against humanity.

International law aims at being universal. In the past, rationalistic approaches based on natural law or based on state equality aimed at establishing a single legal system above every State and equally valid for all of them. More recently, the decolonization process, the end of state-centered legal theory following the failure of the totalitarian states, the explosion in the number of states acting in the international legal sphere,and the growth of powerful states aiming at a hegemonic presence have undermined the unity of international law. Cultural relativism, by describing international law as aEuropean, male-oriented tool for power, has also contributed to this shift. International law itself, by proliferating both in terms of specialized, technical areas and in terms of regional agreements, has abandoned the notion of a single, unified set of material rules regulating a global legal system. Today, international law attempts to renew its goal of regulating an international society formed by different values and actors on a fair basis through its form, particularly the rules regulating law ascertainment and the interpretation of written law in the judicial context. In fragmented,contemporary international law, a unified international judicial reasoning is the attempt to re-propose the universalist tradition of international law.

The investigation purporting this article aims at proving that the methods of interpretations elaborated upon by the European Court of Justice are heavily influenced by the twin-pillars of direct effectiveness and primacy of EU Law which they are meant to servein interpreting and applying the EU Treaties. The so-called “effet utile de l’effet direct” and its corollary of primacy constitute formidable instruments to secure the full effectiveness of rights created by this new legal order in the field of international law (Van Gend enLoos), in which the Member States have limited their sovereign rights and have thuscreated a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves (Costa vs. Enel).The creative jurisprudence of the Court of Justice depends by and large on the constitutional and nomophylactic functions exercised by the Court itself in the legal system stemmed from the original Treaties (nowadays, TEU and TFEU): the frequent recourse to the spirit and goals of the Treaties underpinning the so-called schematic interpretation on the one side, and the necessity to preserve the supremacy of EU Law through an innovative form of purposive interpretation (i.e., Pfeiffer) on the other, are an earmark of the ECJ techniques of interpretation. In such a specific legal system, there is no space left for international law principles as “inadimplenti non est adimplendum” or jurisdictional immunity of States, particularly because EU Law’s legal system has distanced itself from its conventional original root and has undergone a very deep constitutionalizing process through which not only States but also individuals are subjects of law.

L’ultimo libro di Charles Maier Dentro i confini (tit. or. Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500, 2016), tradotto e pubblicato nel 2019 in italiano per i tipi di Einaudi, è un’opera importante per la scelta del tema e poderosa per il bagaglio bibliografico che la sostiene, oltre che ambiziosa per il senso generale dell’opera. Il tema oggetto del libro, il territorio, costituisce uno dei cardini del pensiero occidentale, luogo di sperimentazioni, pratiche consolidate e possibilità interpretative, là dove si alternano fasi di condensazione storica e di resistenza diacronica. Racchiude al suo interno secoli di stratificazioni concettuali e ricomposizioni culturali. Il territorio è il luogo della sintesi, che si realizza proprio quando la trattazione, come nel caso del libro di Maier, mette a nudo diversi universi di senso e nel farlo si aggancia a molteplici variabili della storia umana – così li definisce l’autore – «come l’ambiente, la tecnologia, le divisioni di classe, gli attributi di genere, i principi della fede, della politica e della scienza, e le forme di organizzazione politica» (p. 6). Questo libro non soltanto riesce in tale felice e naturale combinazione, ma rende evidente al lettore il piano teorico sul quale si sviluppa l’indagine storica: «Non è tanto una storia di luoghi, reali o immaginari, coltivati o devastati, bensì una storia dell’organizzazione della superficie terrestre attraverso il diritto, la guerra, il commercio e l’evoluzione tecnologica. Non si tratta nemmeno di una storia dello stato, quanto piuttosto di una struttura sottostante che rende possibili gli stati e le economie»