Straddling villages in international judicial border dispute settlement – an equitable outcome?

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to look at a small part of jurisprudence from the International Court of Justice to examine the intersection of public international law with considerations of local populations in border delimitations. This thesis is a legal doctrinal study of public international law. The materials that are studied are customary law, case law from the International Court of Justice and general principles of international law. In settling the boundary dispute between Cameroon and Nigeria in 2002 the Court drew the border through two villages, Turu and Kotcha. The overarching research question for this thesis is whether there is an alternative interpretation of the applicable legal norms that could have yielded a different outcom. The first sub-question is what legal norms are applied in connection to the straddling villages in Cameroon v. Nigeria, and the second is how considerations of equity infra legem have been used in the settlement of other frontier disputes. The analysis shows that the legal norms of relevance in Cameroon v. Nigeria are customary law of treaty interpretation, and the Court adopts a textual method for interpretation. Regarding equity infra legem, the Court has previously expressly rejected the use of considerations of equity to modify colonial border treaties. However, equity infra legem has been used implicitly in a later case by the Court to interpret another colonial treaty to better suit the needs of the local population. In conclusion, the use of equity in these situations is not entirely clear, and referencing it to keep Turu and Kotcha intact would most likely have been controversial.