The purpose of this article is to examine the attitude of the International Court of Justice toward questions concerning different aspects of the international arbitration process. This relates in particular to disputes over the obligation to submit an alleged dispute to arbitration, disputes over the validity or nullity of an award rendered in an international arbitration process, and appeals to the International Court from other bodies with a power of dispositive decision. These questions have arisen in many different circumstances. The matter is also important having regard to the presence of compromissory clauses in international treaties conferring jurisdiction on the International Court itself, but only after it is clear that a process of arbitration, as the preferred method of dispute settlement, is not going to be successful in the concrete case.

Much has been written on the similarities and differences between arbitration tribunals and international courts; much more could and will certainly be written in the future. The purpose of my comments is to define similarities and differences in regard to the role of equity in both. However, I hope to enter the caveat at the very outset that in this paper I will focus solely on the role of equity in cases where the decision is to be based on international law. Accordingly, I will not here discuss cases of the type I had in mind when I pointed out in a speech delivered 34 years ago to the Legal Committee of the UN General Assembly that “[t]he arbitral solution has been applied in the past to a variety of problems, some of which were not judicial in character and did not raise issues of law”. Nor will I now discuss arbitrations in which the parties have agreed that the arbitrators need not be guided by law, or where the arbitral tribunal is expressly authorized by the parties to decide ex aequo et bono and thereby to settle the matter in a liberal spirit without regard to legal requirements and technicalities. Thus, cases in which the arbitrators have been empowered to seek mutual accommodations that would give offense to neither party are outside the scope of this discussion, as are cases where arbitrators recommended action by one of the parties as an act of grace.

The participation of developing countries in the international legal system poses a perennial dilemma. On the one hand the brutal facts of international economic and commercial interdependence make such participation inevitable. On the other hand, developing countries, for various reasons and with varying degrees of intensity, have articulated their reservations, or indeed experienced considerable difficulties, with respect to such participation. This article considers this dilemma with special reference to the experience of Sub-Saharan African countries in international commercial arbitration.

The effort to attract commercial arbitration to the Permanent Court of Arbitration [hereinafter PCA] in 1962 by introducing the Rules of Arbitration and Conciliation for Settlement of International Disputes between Two Parties of Which only One is a State [hereinafter the 1962 Rules], has met with little success. In other articles of this issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law the reasons for this failure are discussed. These articles also contain suggestions on how changes in the legal framework and the administration of the PCA may improve this situation.