Introduction

Summary

International law has a standard account of the nature of both international law and human rights. Hugh Thirlway states that ‘all subsystems or specialized fields of international law will operate on the basis that they derive their force from the established sources of Article 38 of the ICJ Statute’. Therefore, religion does not provide international law with an established source, and ‘in principle, the individual legal, political, or religious system of a State does not impinge on its acceptance of, and compliance with, general international law’. Further, Thirlway remarks, since ‘the waning of the influence of the teachings of the Catholic Church on moral and legal concepts, it has become possible for at least half a century to say that international law is now free from any religious input—that it is “laicized”’. The formal sources of international law, which are by in large viewed as a pragmatic agreements founded in a secular positivistic legal science developed since the nineteenth century, has had to engage again with religion in a manner that was unanticipated.