The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the pending International Criminal Court (ICC), have or will have competence to exercise their jurisdiction over individuals responsible for having committed crimes enumerated in the Statutes of the courts. From the viewpoint of the application of international law, this means that these Statutes can be applied directly to individuals without any intermediate provisions of domestic law. A person who commits crimes within the jurisdiction of the international criminal courts must account for those acts irrespective of whether the domestic law of his country or locus delicti so stipulates. Nor is it relevant to ask if the Statutes of these courts have domestic effect or are domestically enforceable whether by way of automatic incorporation or the adoption of implementing legislation.

Aboriginal rights have attracted much media attention, nationally and internationally, over the last thirty years. Some important issues surrounding the debate on aboriginal rights relate to land, cultural survival and identity, the right to self-government, and the interaction between collective and individual rights. These issues are often interlinked so that land is of central significance to aboriginal cultural survival and identity, and without land aboriginal peoples cannot assume effective self-governance over their communities. International law has influenced the debate through emerging norms on the rights of indigenous peoples. Indeed, Canada has been at the forefront of standard-setting activities at the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations. The Working Group drafted the Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 1994, which is currently being considered by the UN Commission on Human Rights for adoption as a UN General Assembly Resolution. International law is of relevance where aboriginal peoples are prevented from pursuing domestic remedies for human rights violations, or where remedies do not exist. Domestic law is also subject to international law to the extent that a state ratifies international human rights treaties, agreeing to be bound by obligations to implement treaty provisions, and to monitor compliance through reporting and individual complaints procedures. Developments under international law may also influence domestic law.

The purpose of the present article is to examine whether judicial review, meaning the reviewing of the legality of decisions of political organs by an independent judicial organ, can be regarded as a general principle of law of civilised nations in terms of Article 38(1)(c) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (hereinafter ICJ). This question gains significance in the light of the fact that the United Nations Charter (hereinafter the Charter) is unclear on whether the ICJ has the right to review resolutions of the organisation's political organs, notably the Security Council.