Marshall Islands’ Claim Rejected
In a close vote, the International Court of Justice said it had no jurisdiction to order world nuclear powers to disarm.
The United Nation’s top court on Wednesday rejected a claim brought by the Marshall Islands against Britain, India and Pakistan “that they were not doing enough to halt a nuclear arms race.”
That’s according to this report from Deutsche Welle.
The International Court of Justice ruled that the Micronesian nation “had failed to prove a dispute existed between it and the three nuclear-armed states when the case was filed in 2014.”
The ICJ also said it had “no jurisdiction” in the case.
The Marshall Islands had filed cases against all nuclear-armed powers, the others being the United States, Russia, France, China, Israel and North Korea.
A news report from The Daily Sabah of Turkey explained that the ICJ vote was an “eight-eight deadlock” between the court’s 16 judges on the question of jurisdiction:
It took a casting vote by the court’s President Ronny Abraham’s to break an eight-eight deadlock between the court’s 16 judges on the question of jurisdiction. Abraham acknowledged that the Marshall Islands has a particular interest in nuclear disarmament “by virtue of the suffering of its people” during years of testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958.
Read Civil Beat’s series The Micronesians.
