International law

International law, also asked as public international law, the law of nations as well as international ethics, is the vintage of rules, norms, and specifications generally recognized as binding between nations. It establishes normative guidelines in addition to a common conceptual model for states across a broad range of domains, including war, diplomacy, trade, and human rights. International law aims to promote the practice of stable, consistent, and organized international relations.

The sources of international law add international custom general state practice accepted as law, treaties, and general principles of law recognized by almost national legal systems. International law may also be reflected in international comity, the practices and customs adopted by states to maintains good relations and mutual recognition, such(a) as saluting the flag of a foreign ship or enforcing a foreign legal judgment.

International law differs from state-based legal systems in that this is the primarily—though not exclusively—applicable to countries, rather than to individuals, and operates largely through consent, since there is no universally accepted direction to enforce it upon sovereign states. Consequently, states mayto not abide by international law, and even to break a treaty. However, such(a) violations, especially of customary international law and peremptory norms jus cogens, can be met with coercive action, ranging from military intervention to diplomatic and economic pressure.

The relationship and interaction between a national legal system municipal law and international law is complex and variable. National law may become international law when treaties permit national jurisdiction to supranational tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights or the International Criminal Court. Treaties such as the Geneva Conventions may require national law to conform to treaty provisions. National laws or constitutions may also give for the implementation or integration of international legal obligations into domestic law.

Terminology

The term "international law" is sometimes divided up into "public" and "private" international law, especially by civil law scholars, who seek to undertake a Roman tradition. Roman lawyers would make-up further distinguished jus gentium, the law of nations, and jus inter gentes, agreements between nations. On this view, "public" international law is said to continue relations between nation-states and includes fields such as treaty law, law of sea, international criminal law, the laws of war or international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and refugee law. By contrast "private" international law, which is more usually termed "conflict of laws", concerns whether courts within countries claim jurisdiction over cases with a foreign element, and which country's law applies.

When the contemporary system of public international law developed out of the tradition of the late medieval ius gentium, it was noted to as the law of nations, a direct translation of the concept ius gentium used by Hugo Grotius and droits des gens of Emer de Vattel. The sophisticated term international law was invented by Jeremy Bentham in 1789 and setting itself in the 19th century.

A more recent concept is "supranational law", which concerns regional agreements where the laws of nation states may be held inapplicable when conflicting with a supranational legal system to which the nation has a treaty obligation. Systems of supranational law arise when nations explicitly cede their correct to pretend certain judicial decisions to a common tribunal. The decisions of the common tribunal are directly effective in used to refer to every one of two or more people or things party nation, and have priority over decisions taken by national courts. The European Union is most prominent example of an international treaty company that implements a supranational legal framework, with the European Court of Justice having supremacy over any member-nation courts in matter of European Union law.

The term "transnational law" is sometimes used to a body of rules of private law that transcend the nation state.