International law is usually divided into public international law and private international law. The former consists of the generally understood rules governing the relations between states (see Grotius), as well as an enormous mass of treaty-based specific regulations. Thus it covers both fundamental questions, such as the right to go to war (see just war), how citizens of neutral countries should be treated, the laws against genocide and the code for treating prisoners of war, as well as the regulations on international air traffic control, the law of the sea bed, extradition of criminals and so on. International law in this sense is administered by a host of agencies, the most famous, though not the most effective, being the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague (see war crimes tribunals), a United Nations organization. Legal theorists still debate whether or not international law really is law in the full sense, because there exists no mechanism for enforcing judgments. Despite the fact that major powers do, from time to time, ignore rulings of the ICJ, as the USA did in the judgment of Nicaragua v.
USA which condemned the mining of Nicaraguan ports by the USA in 1984, most international law is obeyed nearly all the time, and clearly affects governmental decisions.
In the late 1990s, following the organization of tribunals to hear cases regarding war crimes in specific conflicts, efforts were made to create a permanent International Criminal Court. A statute detailing the process towards the establishment of such a tribunal (with competence to try suspects on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes) was signed in Rome in July 1998, and was scheduled to enter into force in July 2002 (although many considered that the refusal of some important states, including the USA, to become party to the new Court might affect its practical authority).
Private international law, which is of growing significance, is the body of rules and arbitration agreements covering contractual arrangements between non-governmental bodies from different countries. Although there is no single international court with jurisdiction in private international law, the increasing interdependence of the world economy, and the economic importance of multinational firms makes it very much in the interest of such bodies to co-operate in international arbitration, so that the actual effectiveness of private international law may be greater than the formally institutionalized public international law. The importance of international law actually varies from country to country according to whether their internal doctrine of law is ‘monist’ or not. If it is, a treaty signed by a country may give its own citizens direct rights; in ‘dualist’ countries, international law has to be directly incorporated by parliamentary action before it can be cited before domestic courts.
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