Politics in law making

The book is a pioneer work in this field by an Indian author. In the West, the scholars have been busy over a long time in developing a sociological approach to international law. The author has. successfully adopted this approach to the analysis of his subject of study-The International Law Commission (ILC) of the United Nations.

The ILC was established by the General Assembly to discharge its obligations under Article 13,1 (a) of the UN Charter-The progressive development of international Law and its codification, The member ship of the ILC has risen from 15 in 1949 to 34 in 1982. It meets every year at Geneva for around 12 weeks in summer and occasionally during winter in special sessions. Its task is to recommend drafts. to the General Assembly on various topics of International law, which have either been selected by itself or referred to it by the General Assembly.

The focus of research has been on the process of norm-generation and the people involved in this process. These people are not only the members of the ILC but the various Governments and the members of the General Assembly as well who nominate and elect the ILC members. The attitudes of this whole lot as far as the ILC is concerned has been examined thread bare and the way politics has come to dominate the whole process of "progressive development of International Law and its codifica tion" through the UN has been devastatingly exposed. The author has not concerned himself so much with the final output of the ILC because it falls outside the scope of the present study.

There is no denying that politics and law-making are inextricably interlinked. However, the establish ment of ILC within the UN was the culmination of a long development and could be seen as a synthesis of the legal (technical) and the diplomatic (Political) trends within the codification movement. The ILC was to be an expert body which will provide the technical servicing provided by the the political input will be Assembly and the diplomatic conferences. But the analysis of the composition and working of the ILC has inexorably led the author to the same conclusion that the play of politics has distorted the design as originally conceived by its founders. The statutory require ments of representation of major legal systems and civilizations in the composition of the ILC are paid lip-service only. The members are expected to be experts in International Law and they are in the ILC in their individual capacity-but a scrutiny of the bio-data of the members of the ILC, painstakingly collected by the author, and the projection of different view-points in the discussions of the ILC, make depressing revelations in many cases.

The effort, according to the author, seems to be lost in ambivalence. And that is dangerous. "The pursuits of the International Law Commission are to be seen as part of our quest for survival. In this 'meaningless world' of Jean Paul Sartre, either the homo sapiens organize their existence by ordering human relations through law or blow the world up into oblivion."