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The Opinions of Judge Dionisio Anzilotti at the Permanent Court of International Justice
José María Ruda 1
Full text available: PDF format *
I. Introduction
Dionisio Anzilotti was one of three judges who served on the Permanent Court of International Justice from its inception in 1922 until its end in 1946, when the new International Court of Justice was established. Judges Rafael Altamira of Spain and Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante of Cuba were the other two jurists who sat on the bench together with Anzilotti throughout that period.
The first term of judges of the Permanent Court of International Justice extended from 1922 to 1930, and the second from 1930 to 1939. Anzilotti was elected on the first occasion, and then reelected on the second. Then, on 1st September 1939, World War II broke out in Europe. Due to the prevailing circumstances, the Assembly of the League of Nations determined that it was inadvisable to proceed with elections for the third term of the Court, and that the existing members of the Court should therefore, pursuant to Article 13, paragraph 3, of its Statute, continue to discharge their duties. The Council of the League of Nations tacitly agreed. On that basis, the mandate of the members of the Court was extended until 1946, when the last Assembly of the League of Nations convened. For this reason, Anzilotti retained his position until the end of the War.
The final two cases submitted to the Permanent Court were The Electricity Company of Sofia and Bulgaria, between Belgium and Bulgaria, and `Gerliczy', between Liechtenstein and Hungary. Both cases were interrupted by the outbreak of the War and the invasion of the Netherlands. Therefore, for all practical purposes, the work of the Permanent Court can be considered to have ceased as of 5th December 1939, when it issued an Order concerning an interim measure relating to The Electricity Company of Sofia and Bulgaria.
In 1919, before joining the Court, Anzilotti participated as a member of the Italian delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris. He was immediately appointed, in 1920, as Under-Secretary of the League of Nations in charge of Legal Affairs. In that capacity, he was among the drafters of the Statute of the Permanent Court, and was therefore involved in the work of the Court from its very inception.
Anzilotti was a highly active judge. He participated in all the cases before the Court from 1922 to 1939, and he presided over it from 1928 to 1930, succeeding Max Huber.
During this long period of devoted service to the Court, Anzilotti wrote numerous opinions in several cases. Of course, some of those opinions were either separate or in dissent; however, he always maintained a very prudent and respectful approach to the opinions of his colleagues. In 1930, in the Advisory Opinion on Danzig and the International Labour Organization, Anzilotti defined his understanding of the nature of a dissenting opinion in the following terms:
Very much to my regret I do not concur in the opinion of the Court and it is my duty to say so. Since, in my view, a dissenting opinion should not be a criticism of that which the Court has seen fit to say, but rather an exposition of the views of the writer, I shall confine myself to indicating as briefly as possible what my point of view is and the grounds on which it is based.2
Anzilotti's opinions were of different lengths. In the first years of the Court, they were shorter than afterwards. That was also the general trend of the Court itself, and perhaps this development made him feel obliged to gradually formulate more extensive lines of argument when formulating opinions.
From the viewpoint of contemporary interest, the most important portions of Anzilotti's opinions are undoubtedly his general pronouncements on points of law. Of course, in all his opinions in any particular case, the manner in which he applied legal norms to the specific facts is also important. However, such material is clearly outside the scope of this paper because it is bound to the particular circumstances of each case. With this in mind, we shall mention first the most important statements whereby Anzilotti sought to develop a general rule on the main problems of international law. Then we shall deal with Anzilotti's points of view on procedural matters.
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1 Former President of the International Court of Justice.
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