Lawrence Martin, the lawyer representing the interests of Armenia at the International Court of Justice of the United Nations, addressed the question of the term jurisdiction of the court.
“On Monday I discussed how the only sensible interpretation of Article 22 is that it should be temporally limited to acts and facts that occurred at a time when the Parties to a dispute are both Parties to the Convention; in other words when the Convention is in force between them.
Allowing Azerbaijan to make such claims regarding events that took place before 1996, retroactive application of the convention, would create serious problems.
The retroactivity issue here is that Azerbaijan is trying to use Article 22 to reach back in time and claim the right to raise questions about Armenia’s compliance with its obligations under the CERD in relation to a period of time when Armenia did not owe those obligations to Azerbaijan. In our view, Article 22 simply cannot be used in that way.
The character of the CERD’s substantive obligations only underscores the impermissibility of what Azerbaijan is trying to do.
Yesterday, for the first time, Azerbaijan acknowledged that the substantive obligations at issue in this case are not obligations erga omnes, but obligations erga omnes partes. These obligations, sometimes also referred to as obligations erga omnes contractantes, are owed by States Parties to a treaty to other States Parties.The court noted that each participating state should be interested in the fulfillment of these obligations in the given case. All this is justified in the resolution of the Institute of International Law, which deals with obligations and erga omnes rights in international law.
Treaty rights and obligations are a package deal. And in our case, if a State has no obligations with respect to any act or fact which took place before a treaty enters into force for it, neither can it have any rights with respect to such acts or facts. That means that Azerbaijan should not be permitted to use the right it acquired to access ICJ jurisdiction under Article 22 of the CERD in 1996 to raise complaints in relation to acts or facts which allegedly took place before that date. They are, in short, outside the scope of the Court’s temporal jurisdiction.”
Thus, according to lawyer Lawrence Martin, having joined the Convention on Racial Discrimination in 1993, until September 1996, it had obligations to 140 states, not including Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan joined that convention in 1996.
