Two Danish legal researchers published an essay in Dagbladet Information on September 15, arguing that states are turning to international courts more intensively than ever, despite a widespread narrative of collapse.
The essay is written by Kyra Wigard, a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, and Mikkel Jarle Christensen, an assistant professor at Utrecht University and head of the Copenhagen Centre for Criminology. It appeared Tuesday in Dagbladet Information, as the closing contribution to the paper’s yearlong series on the history of international law.
The two authors write that the docket at the International Court of Justice in The Hague is longer than at any point in its 80-year history. The number of states taking part in those cases, they add, is also without precedent.
Participation in advisory proceedings has risen as well, according to the essay. The advisory opinion on climate change delivered in 2024 drew written submissions from 91 states and international organizations, which the authors describe as the largest participation in the court’s history.
Wigard and Christensen base the essay on their own research over recent years. They mapped participation, conducted interviews, coded interventions and registered which states appeared in which cases.
Their central finding is that the cases attracting the most intensive participation all concern ongoing armed conflicts. Ukraine brought its case against Russia days after the 2022 invasion. South Africa filed its Genocide Convention case over Israel’s Gaza offensive months after October 7, while Gambia had earlier sued Myanmar over the treatment of the Rohingya.
Two coalitions and one exception
The essay identifies two broad groups of participating states. One is geographically wide, including states from the Arab world, Latin America, Africa and Asia, and appears most visibly in support of South Africa’s case.
The second group participates far more intensively and often across all three sets of cases. The authors name the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Ireland as the core, supplemented by countries such as Canada.
The United States is described as an exception. It has backed Ukraine’s legal position at the ICJ while opposing South Africa’s Gaza case, and it has sanctioned judges and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court. The authors note that the more consistent coalition holds together without American leadership.
The scale of state participation in the Ukraine proceedings has been documented elsewhere. According to the legal resource LotusArise, 33 states filed declarations of intervention in Ukraine v. Russia, and 32 were admitted at the preliminary objections stage, described as the largest intervention in the history of international adjudication.
Wigard and Christensen conclude that calling this a crisis for the international legal order is inaccurate. In their assessment, the relevant question is who is fighting for international law, and which version of it they are fighting for.
The essay is also available as a podcast episode in Information’s series on the international legal order, which the paper has run over the past year.
