During the last twenty years, the world has experienced a sharp rise in the number of international courts and tribunals, and a correlative expansion of their jurisdictions. These occurrences have dramatically affected and will continue to affect the fields of international law and international relations. The creation and operation of international judicial bodies that are capable of enforcing international commitments, interpreting international treaties, and settling international conflicts have facilitated the growth of international legal norms and cooperative regimes governing important areas of international law and politics, such as economic relations, human rights, and armed conflicts. International courts — understood in this article as independent judicial bodies created by international instruments and invested with the authority to apply international law to specific cases brought before them — have thus become important actors as well as policy instruments in the hands of international lawmakers. Such courts serve, in some respects, as the lynchpin of a new, rule-based international order, which increasingly displaces or purports to displace the previous power-based international order.

Albania ranks among the smallest and poorest countries in Europe, located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas just north of Greece. It gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 (accounting for the fact that a majority of the population is Muslim) and subsisted as a monarchy for much of the interwar period. Albania was occupied by Italy (and then Nazi Germany) for all of the Second World War. Communist partisans expelled the Germans in 1944, without the assistance of Soviet forces, and thus began nearly a half-century of a totalitarian, isolationist rule by an extremely repressive Communist regime under the leadership of Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia. This regime was definitively overthrown in 1991. Since that time, Albania has been periodically wracked by civil and political unrest, leading to substantial violence in 1997 that was quelled only with the brief deployment of a UN multinational protection force.

Judge Stephen Schwebel has every right to attack the International Court of Justice's judgment in the Nicaragua case and to defend his dissenting opinion. But he goes too far when he accuses Nicaragua of perpetrating a "fraud on the Court." A response is appropriate, especially from counsel cited by Judge Schwebel for "proposing, developing, and arguing Nicaragua's case."

On November 17, 2011, the UN General Assembly elected the members of the International Law Commission for the next five years. In the course of the quinquennium that was completed in August 2011 with the end of the sixty-third session, the Commission concluded four major topics on its agenda: the law of transboundary aquifers, the responsibility of international organizations, the effect of armed conflicts on treaties, and reservations to treaties. It was by any standard a substantial output. The beginning of a new quinquennium now provides an opportunity to assess what the Commission has achieved, to consider the way it operates, and to reflect on what lies ahead for it.