The International Court of Justice and Border-Conflict Resolution in Africa: The Bakassi Peninsula Conflict

There is general agreement among historians that ethnic conflicts have been the core cause of bloodshed in Europe and the Mediterranean world. The deep scars that these conflicts leave on people and nations are often obscured by historical accounts that, more often than not, glorify conquest and ignore aggression. Though ethnic conflicts have defined European history for centuries, Africa was spared this problem until the Europeans decided to treat the continent as free-for-all real estate.

European colonial rule in Africa left behind the same scars as their Balkanization schemes had left in Europe. Nations were divided by colonizers, territory was bartered among them, and economic life was shattered. The results of colonial misrule are obvious. Today 103 ethnic conflicts are ongoing on the African continent. Some of them are old-fashioned land disputes while others are the product of artificially drawn international borders that divided ethnic groups, and still others have oil in the mix. One such conflict that involves all of the above is the dispute between Nigeria and Cameroon over the Bakassi Peninsula. It is a unique case, reflective of both the colonial heritage and the modern thirst for oil. At the same time, Bakassi emerges as an example of conflict resolution through the rule of law and without resort to arms. My purpose in this essay is to trace the origins of this struggle, delineate conflicting claims over the territory, and reflect on the broader significance of the manner in which it was resolved in contrast with previous approaches to the resolution of ethnic disputes.

Prior to World War I, nation-states chose war as their preferred instrument for settling international border conflicts. After the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, many countries accepted international mechanisms to address such conflicts, and several conflicts were settled through international negotiation. Among the wars were the Albania-Greece conflict (Northern Epirus); the Albania-Yugoslavia-Serbia conflict of 1913, involving border adjustments; the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict (Karabakh); and the Poland-Czechoslovakia disputes (Teschen, Spisz, and Orawa). The latter also involved territorial and population adjustments. This approach gained momentum and accelerated after World War II and would eventually be expanded to the regulation of international trade. Thus, by 1995 member states of the World Trade Organization (WTO) submitted an annual average of thirty cases for resolution using the WTO's international dispute mechanism.¹

In 1946, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was designated as the institution to play an important legal role in the resolution of border conflicts among UN member states, and legal doctrines were established as prerequisites in determining the relative merits of claims and their final disposition. Since its establishment, the ICJ has become the principal judicial organ of the UN entrusted with the resolution of legal disputes between sovereign states. The court consists of fifteen judges elected by the UN General Assembly and confirmed by the Security Council. Under Article 36 (2) (the Optional Clause) of the ICJ Statute, the court has jurisdiction in settling disputes between UN member states.

The "Optional Clause" provides that state parties to the statute (i.e., UN member states as well as Nauru and Switzerland) may at any time declare that they recognize as compulsory, without special agreement, in relation to any other state accepting the same obligation, the court's jurisdiction in all legal disputes concerning the interpretation of a treaty, any question of international law, the existence of any fact that, if established, would constitute a breach of an international obligation or the nature or extent of the reparation to be made for the breach of an international obligation.²

Among some of the early disputes that the court addressed were those of the Minuiers and Ecrehos islands between the United Kingdom and France (1950), the border enclaves dispute between the Netherlands and Belgium (1957), the eastern section of the border between Nicaragua and Honduras (1957), the Beagle Channel Islands between Argentina and Chile (1970), the territory along the Beli River between Mali and Burkina Faso (1983), the Gulf of Fonseca between El...