On 25 September 2024, Judge Hilary Charlesworth received the Edgar de Picciotto International Prize and delivered the opening lecture of the 2024–2025 academic year at the Geneva Graduate Institute on “Hopes and Fears for International Law: The Work of the International Court of Justice”. Hilary Charlesworth is an Australian international lawyer, Judge at the International Court of Justice since November 2021, Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, as well as Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University.

Director Marie-Laure Salles opened the event, affirming the Institute’s steadfast belief in the importance of international law: “The Geneva Graduate Institute has it in its DNA, ever since its creation in 1927, to believe that the only hope for peace and justice lies in international collaboration and international law.”

Judge Charlesworth’s lecture considered the role of the International Court of Justice in the development of international law, sharing the crucial role optimism played in its history. The Court, established almost 80 years ago, is at its busiest-ever point.

Yet, enforcement is a constant challenge for international law, and as a result, the Court is sometimes dismissed as a toothless tiger. Compliance, according to Judge Charlesworth, is “a subject which typically evokes fears about the value of the institution”.

“The Court isn’t a panacea to international tensions and disputes, and its jurisdiction is limited based on state consent,” she insisted. “And yet, at the same time, the Court is much more than the hapless creature of powerful states, and I think it deserves fine-grained analyses to understand its daily life and rituals, and the possibilities it offers, sometimes in the interstices of what it does to promote particular forms of international justice.”

 

The Edgar de Picciotto International Prize was created as a tribute and token of thanks to Edgar de Picciotto who, along with his family, gifted a generous contribution for the realisation of the Edgar and Danièle de Picciotto Student Residence, which houses students coming from all over the world to study at the Institute. The Prize, awarded every two years, is intended to reward an internationally renowned academic whose research has contributed to the understanding of global challenges and whose work has influenced policymakers.

The prize was awarded the first time in 2012 to Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics; in 2014 to Saul Friedländer, Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles and recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize; in 2016 to Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics; in 2018 to Joan Wallach Scott, Emerita Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University; in 2020 to Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University; and in 2022 to Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, Harvard University.
 

This article was published in Globe #34, the Graduate Institute Review.