Is International law, law at all?

Law is presumed to be a set of rules used to govern the citizens. International law is a body of law used to appropriately govern the legal relationship between or among sovereign states. However, there have been questions about whether it is a law or an international relation (d'Amato, 1984). For instance, within a country, the legislative branch of the government creates the rules, the judiciary interprets them, while the executive ensures they are enforced. In most cases, the police force the citizens to abide by the rules created (Thirlway, 2019).

On the contrary, international law does not have a legislative, judiciary, executive, and policy frameworks to enforce the law. However, the fact that there is no authority to ensure law compliance does not mean there is no law. Therefore, international law can still be considered law with special status (Roberts, 2017).

International law does not have a mechanism to enforce, thus, becoming one of its most significant challenges. Any law can only make sense; it is applied equally to everyone. The question is, what happens whenever a corporation, private individual, or a sovereign state violates the laws put in place? Mainly, domestic laws depend on the process of guilt or innocence determination, penalty assignment, and the penalty application. In international law, enforcement forms the major challenge (d'Amato, 1984).

Nonetheless, two measures exist to ensure enforcement of the law; the first one is through the use of international bodies like the International Criminal Court and the UN to enforce the law. Another one is through self-enforcement by the respective states. However, the judgment of international law is as well arguable (Roberts, 2017). Subsequently, the international exhibits many inconsistencies and weaknesses during law enforcement, resulting in doubts about whether or not international law should be considered law. Furthermore, most states are known to have obeyed the international law only in scenarios where such laws favor their interest. Some scholars also argue that international law is law...…alone. As a result, international law depicts characteristics of international relations other than law. For instance, through consent, states choose their best interest; however, as soon as that State's priorities shift or the best alternatives appear, the consent is rescinded (d'Amato, 1984).

Another reason why international law has no significant difference from international relations is the continuous shift in the general principles of the sources of international law. At the same time, some are also too vague to form the structure of an international legal system. Customary law relies on opinion Juris and State of practice that can be mistakenly treated to a state simply taking action for its convenience for a while, and treaties can only be enforced when a group of parties or one party is strong enough to enforce compliance on another (Guicherd, 1999).

To conclude, in reality, there is nothing like international law that exists in practice. The current international law as founded has no significant difference from international relations (Malanczuk, 2002).