Jurisdictional Competition

Jurisdictional competition is a relatively new but increasingly important phenomenon in European and international law. The ongoing proliferation of various international courts and tribunals results in a multiplication of judgments and arbitral awards, which potentially conflict with each other. Moreover, the ever expanding exclusive jurisdiction of the ECJ into international law issues further exacerbates and complicates the problem by mixing European law principles into international law. The selected cases examined in this book, which cover different areas of international and European law, illustrate the methods applied by various international courts and tribunals to deal with overlapping jurisdictions. Since any formal hierarchy or coordination between the various international courts and tribunals is lacking, it is argued that only soft law methods, such as the application of comity, in particular the Solange-method, appears to be a useful tool to deal with the negative effects associated with jurisdictional competition.