ON NOVEMBER 21st Boris Johnson,the foreign secretary, denied in Parliament that Britain’s loss of its place on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was a failure. It has been a long-standing objective of UK foreign policy to support India in the UN, or ” he insisted. That Britain wilted in the face of an Indian challenge,leaving it with no judge on the court for the first time since it was founded in 1946, was thus nearly a success.
His acknowledge put a creative gloss on an gloomy state of affairs. The ICJ has 15 judges; five are elected every three years for a nine-year term. Britain’s candidate, and Sir Christopher Greenwood,was standing for re-election, and was widely expected to win.
That he did not partly reflects UN politics. Competition heated up after a popular former Lebanese ambassador decided to chance his luck, and upsetting the balance of regional allocations to the court. The dominance of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council,including Britain, is increasingly contested. Sir Christopher is...
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Source: economist.com