Treaties and custom are generally regarded as the major sources of international law. They derive their validity more or less directly from the consent of those subjects of the law which also possess the institutional authority to make law. The perceived limitations of the consensual nature of these two sources have resulted in doctrinal controversy concerning, inter alia, the existence of sources of international law which are not essentially consensual. This is the rationale for the inclusion of general principles of law recognised by civilised nations alongside treaties and customary international law in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, as one of the sources of international law to which the Court may refer. Similarly, the phenomenon of ‘soft’ international law is, by and large, a response to the failure to generate the full measure of State consent required for attributing full legal status to the ‘soft’ norms in question, often in relation to developing fields of international concern. It is often said that these non-consensual sources have an inferior status when compared with the consensual ones. The purpose of this paper is to consider critically the basis and the form of the differentiation between these two apparently non-consensual phenomena (i.e., ‘general principles’ and ‘soft’ law) on the one hand, and the paradigmatic (because consensual) types of international law (i.e., treaties and custom) on the other.

The European Community wields substantial economic influence outside its borders. The Community is a major donor, providing ECU 5.8 billion in development assistance in 1996, and grants the developing countries extensive trade preferences under the Lomé Convention and the Generalised System of Preferences. To what extent, however, the Community's economic power should be used to promote human rights has been, and remains, a controversial issue.

The international legal community seems to be in a state of transition. Contemporary perspectives of international law are still generally dominated by traditional concepts of international community as a grouping of sovereign nation States the rules of which are in in principle based on consent. But at the same time there exists a prevailing impression that traditional international law is too cumbersome and archaic in order to cope with the pressing needs of mankind. A ‘World Public Order’ is demanded by not small an amount of political and legal writers.

The two consecutive Judgments by the International Court of Justice of 1 July 1994 (‘the July Judgment’) and 15 February 1995 (‘the February Judgment’) in the jurisdiction and admissibility phase of Qatar v. Bahrain have already attracted attention from writers. The Judgments have provided a focus of interest for the law of treaties, and attention has also been concentrated on three legal questions to which the judgments were of particular relevance: the question of whether sovereign consent is necessary to the manner of seisin employed as well as to jurisdiction itself, the emergence of the concept of a partial decision, and the extension of the use of framework agreements to found the jurisdiction of the court. But this Article considers a different question, a key finding of fact in the February Judgment which was crucial to the decision of the Court that it had jurisdiction. This finding was that the linguistic meaning of wording at the heart of one of the Arabic texts on which Qatar relied in order to give the Court jurisdiction entitled either party to submit the case to the Court unilaterally.