Farhad Ataiepour (Shahid Beheshti University) has posted Elementary Considerations of Humanity as a Jurisdictional Innovation in the ICJ: Re-Theorizing the Corfu Channel Judgment and the Humanization of Inter-State Conduct on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The Corfu Channel Judgment (1949) of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stands among the foundational decisions of the postwar international legal order. Yet its most enduring contribution lies not in its findings on territorial sovereignty or mine warfare, but in the Court’s articulation of “elementary considerations of humanity” as a normative ground for state obligations. This article argues that the ICJ, through a creative and purposive interpretation of Article 34 of the Statute, subtly expanded its adjudicatory role, forging a conceptual bridge between traditional state-centric international law and the emerging humanization of interstate conduct The Court’s reasoning reveals an early “event horizon”-a conceptual threshold at which classical doctrines of state sovereignty (Westphalian logic) become insufficient to regulate transboundary harms affecting human life. By grounding Albania’s responsibility not only in territorial control but in a duty to warn grounded in humanity, the Court created a protodoctrine that would later inform the development of erga omnes obligations, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This article re-theorizes Corfu Channel as a jurisdictional innovation: a moment in which the Court leveraged its state-centric mandate to introduce universal ethical principles into binding legal reasoning, thus shaping the long-term trajectory of international law’s shift toward human-centered normativity.