Nibm International Law

National Institute of Business Management

Chennai - 020

Second SEMESTER EMBA/ MBA

Subject : International Law

Q 1. Explain the origin of international legal order.

Trade is the reason and at the origin of entire segments of public international law, and accounts for one of its main sources. One of the first International legal instruments to leave its trace in history was the commercial treaty between Amenophis IV and the King of Cyprus, during the XIV Century BC. This Treaty exempts Cypriot Traders from customs duty in exchange for the importation of certain quantity of copper and wood. Nothing has fundamentally changed since. In the XXI century, we still have bilateral trade agreements, but they now have to be notified to the World Trade Organization WTO, where they check it for consistency with International Trade Rules.

The International Legal Order, has evolved dramatically. Philippe le Bel and Jean Bodin’s jurists progressively conceptualized the notion of sovereignty, The Treaties of Westphalia ushered in the pre-eminence of a society of Sovereign States, The Congress of Vienna of 1815 laid the foundation for multilateralism, and the XIX century gave birth to the first International Organizations. With the creation of the league of Nations followed by the United Nations System, and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, the XX century saw the evolution of traditional international law between states, move and change towards a contemporary and universal international law, open to new players such as the international organizations and the non-governmental organizations.

The WTO IS AN International Organization. The GATT, which was replaced by the WTO in 1994, was a provisional agreement that entered into force in January 1948 and was to disappear with the treaty creating the International Trade Organization. GATT did not have ‘Members’ but ‘Contracting Parties’, a term which highlighted the purely contractual nature of the arrangement. The GATT...