“BIASES AND INTERNATIONAL ADJUDICATION”

Annual Meeting 2020 of the Interest Group on International Courts and Tribunals (IGICT - ESIL) 

Online sessions

 

Thursday 10 September 2020
10.00-12.00 and 14.00-16.00

Studies of biases are not a novelty in international law, including in the field of international adjudication. The institutional decisions of international courts and tribunals cannot be immune from some of the biases of individuals who shape the outcomes of international adjudication. It is ‘common knowledge’, as Thomas Franck acknowledged in 1966, that we all have biases and that ‘subjective’ and ‘socially conditioned’ attitudes of the decision maker play a role (T. M. Franck, (1966) 19 Stanford Law Review 1217 at 1247). According to Martin Kuijer’s analysis published in 1997, national bias among the judges of the International Court of Justice was proved to be ‘more than a hypothesis’ (M. Kuijer, (1997) 10 LJIL 49 at 66). More recently, a growing number of (experimental) findings shed light on the role of adjudicators’ intuitive and automatic thinking. The analyses of biases have also led us to critically consider the question of transparency in decision- making processes (including the selection of judges and the issues of recusal to the openness of the procedure to third parties). Other studies have challenged, for example, the assumption about decision-making that groups usually enhance the quality of the outcomes of deliberative processes, by investigating groupthink behaviour.

Against this background, the seminar will explore the implications of (broadly defined) biases in the practices of, and analysis about, international courts and tribunals.

Sponsored by the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law, this workshop is organised by: Edouard Fromageau (edouard.fromageau@abdn.ac.uk); Andrea Gattini (andrea.gattini@unipd.it); Machiko Kanetake (m.kanetake@uu.nl) ; and Stephan Wittich (stephan.wittich@univie.ac.at).

If you are interested in participating in this event, please register via Zoom Webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ALvBSRqJTayl0Vk4u4Kpuw

The registered participants will receive a website link before the event. Participation is free of charge.

Programme

Session 1 (10.00-12.00)
10.10-10.10: Opening
10.10-10.40: (15 minutes presentation, followed by Q&A)
10.40-11.00: Networking breakout rooms
11.30-12.00
Session 2 (14.00-16.00)
14.00-14.05: (Re)opening
14.05-14.35
14.35-14.50: Networking breakout rooms
14.50-15.20
15.20-15.50
15.50-16.00: Closing