Obligations Concerning Negotiations Relating to Cessation of the Nuclear Arms Race and to Nuclear Disarmament

In this trio of decisions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) rejected applications in which a small island state claimed that three larger states known to possess nuclear weapons had breached their international obligations to undertake and conclude negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Court acknowledged, had been the location of repeated nuclear weapons testing from 1946 to 1958, when the United States administered the archipelagic nation under the trusteeship system of the United Nations. The Court further recognized that the applicant, “by virtue of the suffering which its people endured as a result of it being used as a site for extensive nuclear testing programs, has special reasons for concern about nuclear disarmament” (para. 44). Nevertheless, it ruled that the cases could not go forward because the requisite legal dispute was absent at the time that the Marshall Islands filed its applications against India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom.