PhD defence

Balancing Powers: Safeguarding Judicial Independence and Promoting Accountability of International Courts through Financial Governance

• A.M. Manolescu

Date

Friday 14 February 2025

Time

11:30 - 12:30 hour

Address

Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden

Supervisor(s)

• Prof.dr. N.M. Blokker
• Prof.dr. S.V. Vasiliev

Summary

Many institutional design decisions made for one of the first international courts in the 1920s continue to be applied a century later, including some that are often disapproved. International courts and tribunals (ICTs) face similar challenges in their financial governance, yet often repeat unsuccessful practices, ignore successful ones or reinvent the wheel. This is due to ICTs operating in their own bubble, as well as the scarce research available on the topic - a gap addressed by this thesis.

Financial governance encompasses the legal rules, practices, and actors shaping an ICT’s budgetary and oversight processes. It is not merely about money; financial governance is about balancing at times competing, seemingly opposite, acts of power and control. As funders, states hold some control over the institution, while judges must be able to decide cases free from pressure or interference. This raises the question: which accountability mechanisms, considered in the particular context of an ICT, can protect or on the contrary might amount to an improper interference with the judicial process, thereby threatening judicial independence?

This dissertation analyses the financial governance of seven ICTs selected as case studies (PCIJ, ICJ, ITLOS, WTO AB, IACtHR, CJEU, and ICC), and provides a comparative analysis to identify similarities and differences in ICTs' financial governance rules and practices, as well as the challenges they faced, and the approaches employed to address them. Building on this, ten key findings and recommendations are put forward, covering budget processes, actors of internal and external financial governance, budget instruments, judicial independence and accountability.   

PhD dissertations

Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.

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