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The International Court Of Justice's Treatment Of Circumstantial Evidence And Adverse Inferences, Michael P. Scharf, Marqaux Day

Faculty Publications

This Article examines a vexing evidentiary question with which the International Court of Justice has struggled in several cases, namely: What should the Court do when one of the parties has exclusive access to critical evidence and refuses to produce it for security or other reasons? In its first case, Corfu Channel, the Court decided to apply liberal inferences of fact against the non-producing party, but in the more recent Crime of Genocide case, the Court declined to do so under seemingly similar circumstances. By carefully examining the treatment of evidence exclusively accessible by one party in these and other …