Demetru Negulescu

Demetru Negulescu (born  January 18, 1875 in Bucharest , †  1950 ) was a Romanian lawyer and diplomat . He served from 1901 to 1930 as a professor at the University of Bucharest and from 1922 to 1930 as an assistant judge and from 1931 to 1946 as a regular judge at the Permanent International Court of Justice . One focus of his work was the legal character of the opinions of the Court of Justice.

Life

Demetru Negulescu was born in Bucharest in 1875 and received his doctorate in law from the University of Paris in 1900 , after having obtained a degree in mathematics . From 1901 to 1908 he acted as a judge in his hometown, and from 1901 to 1930 he was professor of international law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Bucharest . He also taught in 1936 as a lecturer at the Hague Academy of International Law and was temporarily President of the Romanian Institute for International Law and co-editor of the journal Revista de Drept International .

At the international level he represented his home country at various conferences, for example at the first, second and sixth sessions of the Assembly of the League of Nations , which was founded after the end of the First World War . During the Conference for the Codification of International Law, held in The Hague in 1930 , he was deputy head of the Romanian delegation. In addition, he was a member of the committee that worked out the statute of the Permanent International Court of Justice (StIGH). From 1922 to 1930 he was an assistant judge ( juge-suppléant ) on the court, and in September 1930 he was elected a regular judge . After he took office at the beginning of 1931, he remained active at the court beyond the regular end of his term of office until its dissolution in April 1946, as the judges' elections planned for 1939 did not take place due to the start of the Second World War . However, due to the war, the activities of the court ceased in 1942.

From 1923 Demetru Negulescu was a member of the Institut de Droit international . He died in 1950.

Act

One focus of Demetru Negulescu's interests was the legal character of the opinions of the Permanent International Court of Justice. In this regard, he distinguished two types of expert opinion: on the one hand, expert opinions that dealt with general questions of international law without reference to a specific legal dispute, and on the other, expert opinions whose starting point was an existing conflict and in which the underlying questions were answered so that would amount to settling the conflict. According to his analysis, this distinction, which, for example, had an impact on the procedural progress of a case with regard to the possibility of nominating ad hoc judges and, in his opinion, also influenced the legal character of the reports, did not become part of the practice of the Court until around 1927 by. In expert opinion, which of two or more Member States had been requested to rule on a conflict simultaneously over the organs of the League, he saw a special form, which he called "advisory arbitration " ( consultative / advisory arbitration designated).

In his opinion, the Council of the League of Nations had a moral obligation to respect the findings of an expert opinion and to implement them or to obey them. Even if the reports of the StIGH did not have a directly binding effect, he saw in them an important contribution to the further development of international law. His publications and comments on this topic, to which he also devoted himself in his lecture series at the Hague Academy for International Law, are still considered to be an important reference for the opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which succeeded the StIGH after the Second World War Founded. Some of the principles he formulated are still fundamental to the ICJ's opinions today. These are basically of a public nature and, analogous to the relations between the StIGH and the Assembly and the Council of the League of Nations, can only be requested by the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations .

Works (selection)

• Teoria poprirei. Bucharest 1927
• L'évolution de la procédure des avis consultatifs de la Cour permanente de justice international. The Hague in 1936 and Paris in 1937

literature

• Biographical Notes concerning the Judges and Deputy-Judges. M. Demètre Negulesco, Judge. In: Seventh Annual Report of the Permanent Court of International Justice. AW Sijthoff's Publishing, Leiden 1931, pp. 34/35
• Bogdan Aurescu: Demetru Negulescu (1875-1950) - A Life Dedicated to International Law. In: Revista Română de Drept Internațional. 2/2006. CH Beck, pp. 218/219, ISSN  1584-1898
• Bogdan Aurescu: The Contribution of Judge Demetru Negulescu to the Study of the Legal Nature of the Advisory Opinions of the Permanent Court of International Justice. 2/2006. CH Beck, pp. 220-222, ISSN  1584-1898