The Applicability of Stare Decisis to International Law en English Courts

Extract

The question whether decisions of English courts dealing with points of international law should be regarded as binding precedents has never been authoritatively decided. One view regards a rule of international law, once incorporated by the decision of an English court, as part of municipal law to which the doctrine of stare decisis must apply in the same manner as to a rule of purely domestic origin. Lord Atkin's famous statement in Chung Chi Cheung v. The King is sometimes put forward as necessitating this conclusion:

“It must be always remembered that, so far, at any rate, as the courts of this country are concerned, international law has no validity save in so far as its principles are accepted and adopted by our domestic law. There is no external power that imposes its rules upon our own code of substantive law or procedure. The courts acknowledge the existence of a body of rules which nations accept amongst themselves. On any judicial issue they seek to ascertain what the relevant rule is, and, having found it, they will treat it as incorporated into the domestic law, so far as it is not inconsistent with rules enacted by statutes or finally declared by their tribunals.”