International Law and International Relations: United Kingdom Practice
Full text available: PDF format
Abstract
Any consideration of the part played by international law in the conduct of the United Kingdom's international relations requires some preliminary description of the way in which both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and its legal advisers are organised. The inter-relationship between the legal advisers and the rest of the Office is fundamental to the extent to which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in its day to day practice, can and does take account of international law.
I. The Legal Advisers and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
At full strength, the British Diplomatic Service has a team of twenty-six legal advisers. Of these, twenty serve in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London. Four others serve at diplomatic posts abroad - in Berlin, Bonn, Brussels and New York. In addition, there are two legal advisers who are seconded outside the FCO - one with the Legal Secretariat to the Law Officers (about which more will be said later), and the other with the Government of Hong Kong (a somewhat special post, but necessary for obvious reasons at this particular stage in Hong Kong's development).
The legal advisers are all professionally qualified (or, exceptionally in the case of new recruits, about to become fully qualified in the very near future). In British terms this means that they are all either barristers or solicitors, or their Scottish equivalents. Recruitment is by means of open competitions organised by the Civil Service Commission, which is the body principally responsible for recruiting civil servants. These competitions are usually held every two or three years, and in general one or two lawyers are recruited at a time: with a relatively small group of twenty lawyers in London, it can be difficult to absorb and train more than two new recruits at any one time. The selection of candidates is based on a scrutiny of their academic and professional qualifications and experience as well as interviews with short-listed candidates.
Generally speaking, successful recruits will either have been lawyers in private or public practice or have come direct from universities. In addition to their professional qualifications, they will nearly always have some post-graduate qualifications or experience in either public international law or in subjects which are related to public international law, such as European Community law or Human Rights law.
It is also to be noted that the legal advisers are career-long legal specialists. They join the Diplomatic Service as legal advisers, and stay as legal advisers. They are nevertheless members of and integrated into the Diplomatic Service. It is possible for legal advisers to transfer to the mainstream Diplomatic Service, but this is rare.
The way the legal advisers contribute to the work of the FCO depends upon the way in which that Office is organised. It has about seventy Departments; some are geographical Departments (such as Western European Department, South American Department, and North American Department), while others are functional Departments (like Protocol Department, and Consular Department). Each of these Departments has a designated legal adviser: each Department knows to whom it should turn if it needs legal advice on some aspect of its affairs. The mathematics make it evident that with only twenty legal advisers in the FCO and some seventy Departments, each legal adviser has to advise more than one Department. It is in fact a little more complicated than that, because some Departments are split for purposes of legal advice. To give an example, the South American Department deals not only with South America (Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and so on) but also with Antarctica. Antarctica, however, is somewhat special and certainly raises foreign policy and legal issues quite different from those which arise in relation to the States of the South American continent. It is therefore convenient to have for Antarctic matters a different legal adviser from the one who advises the rest of the South American Department. Fo
The free viewer (Acrobat Reader) for PDF file is available at the Adobe Systems
