Court tout court

Jacob Mundy strikes again, taking you through the International Court of Justice's landmark 1975 verdict on the sovereignty of the Western Sahara. For those of you who want to know who Western Sahara really belongs to, but are too lazy to read more than the summary of the verdict -- the whole case record is at least quadrilingual, and would fill a modest bookshelf -- now, finally, someone has done it for you.

Did the Sahrawi tribes pay tribute to and pray in the name of the Moroccan sultan? Did he appoint their leaders and issue decrees that they followed? Did Hassan I visit his loyal subjects in the Moroccan Sahara in 1882? Did surrounding nations ever recognize Moroccan rule in today's Western Sahara, before Morocco charged in guns blazing in 1975? Or was the territory simply unowned desert, no-one there, up for grabs? And, considering the potentials of a Mohammed Abdelaziz vs. Mohammed Abdelaziz showdown, what about the now long-forgotten Mauritanian claim to the territory?

[picture: you shut up, and you stop swiping colonial territories. next!]

All of them interesting questions, which were analyzed in mindnumbing detail by the ICJ judges and various expert panels. A hint to the answer lies in the fact that

The sixteen judges voted 14 to 2 against Morocco and 15 to 1 against Mauritania. In both cases, the dissenting vote was an ad hoc judge appointed by Morocco under a special ICJ rule. Yet in the case of Morocco, the other dissenting voice felt that the Court should have rejected Morocco’s claims more vehemently.

Mundy's full lecture can be found in an English PDF here, and a Spanish translation is available through here. And should you muster the strength, all of the awful rest that the ICJ read and wrote is linked from this post or, directly, here.