CJIL Online 3.2

Summer

2024

Normatively, most nations agree that holding onto artifacts belonging to other peoples is both morally and legally unconscionable, but practically, there has been no enforcement scheme under international law for artifacts to finally return home. Calabresi and Melamed’s property, liability, and inalienability rules could be justified and applied to repatriation disputes through consideration of a mixture of economic efficiency, distributive, and justice motivations. Using this framework to create a model of variable protection of international law would create a comprehensive enforcement scheme that resolves the fundamental enforcement problem that international law faces in facilitating repatriation.

Multilingual treaties have a long history of interpretation at the International Court of Justice. Yet the ICJ has often ignored their unique features and interpreted them as they would any other treaty. This has led to judgments and advisory opinions that fail to reconcile discrepancies between language versions of multilingual treaties and therefore do not follow the interpretive guidelines set under Article 33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Yet these issues facing the ICJ are not unique to that Court. Many jurisdictions face the problems of multilingualism and use novel solutions that the ICJ could incorporate. This Comment begins by analyzing two challenges facing multilingual legislation in Canada and the European Union, namely: de facto unilingualism and discrepancies in language versions. Next, it will argue that both jurisdictions have relied on unique solutions to address those two challenges. Finally, this Comment will turn its attention back to multilingual treaties and the ICJ. It will argue that the same challenges that face multilingual legislation exist for multilingual treaties. Given this, it will argue that the solutions used by Canada and the EU can be applied in the context of treaties and the ICJ should adopt those solutions to better reflect the purposes of Article 33 of the Vienna Convention and the unique principles of multilingual treaties.