Solidarity in the International Court of Justice: defining “legal interest” in the South-West Africa cases

Vasuki Nesiah seeks to interpret the right to self-determination as one that is framed through the notion of solidarity in decolonial international legal practice. Contestations regarding Liberia and Ethiopia’s jus standi in the South-West Africa cases at the ICJ illuminate how Namibia’s right to self-determination and pan-African solidarity were inextricably bound. This chapter reads the Ethiopia and Liberia submissions to the ICJ as reflecting how the right to self-determination emerges as an exercise of political agency in two senses—first, the formerly decolonized asserting such a right by claiming formal recognition of sovereignty in the community of nations, and second, the solidaristic force of struggling for self-determination as a collective right that is seeking to transform the structural conditions of the community of nations. Nesiah argues that this approach is reflective of customary international law, including in arguments made in subsequent ICJ cases. This articulation of the right to self-determination in a more collective register of world-making was especially powerful and precedent-setting in the 30-year heyday of self-determination struggles, from 1945 to 1975.