World Court Digest

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I.	Substantive International Law - First Part
5.	THE UNITED NATIONS
5.1.	General Questions

¤ Legality of the Threat or Use
of Nuclear Weapons
Advisory Opinion of 8 July 1996
I.C.J. Reports 1996, p. 226

[p. 381 D.O. Shahabuddeen] The first preambular paragraph of the Charter recorded that "the Peoples of the United Nations" were "[d]etermined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind ...". A world free of conflict was not guaranteed; but, read in the light of that and other statements in the Charter, Article 9 of the Statute shows that the Court was intended to serve a civilized society. A civilized society is not one that knowingly destroys itself, or knowingly allows itself to be destroyed. A world without people is a world without States. The Charter did not stipulate that mankind would continue, but it at least assumed that it would; and the assumption was not the less fundamental for being implicit.

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