Permanent Court of Arbitration
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The phrase Hague Tribunal can also be used to refer to ICTY.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), also known as the Hague Tribunal is an international organization based in The Hague in the Netherlands. It was established in 1899 as one of the acts of the first Hague Peace Conference, which makes it the oldest institution for international dispute resolution. As of 2006, 106 countries were party to the treaty. The Court deals in cases submitted to it by consent of the parties involved and handles cases between countries and between countries and private parties.
The PCA is housed in the Peace Palace in The Hague, which was built specially for the Court in 1913 with an endowment from the Carnegie Foundation. From 1922 on, the building also housed the distinctly separate Permanent Court of International Justice, which later became the International Court of Justice in 1946.
Unlike the International Court of Justice, the PCA is not an inter-state court. Parties may apply here for arbitration, mediation or examination of the facts. Unlike the ICJ, the Court is not just open to states but also to other parties. Organisations, private enterprises and even private individuals may apply here to resolve a dispute with a state.
The seeds of thought that led to the creation of the PCA were planted in the United States. Annual meetings were conducted by the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, beginning in 1895, in New York State at the Mohonk Mountain House hotel.
The public at large is usually more familiar with the International Court of Justice than with the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The fact that people are relatively unfamiliar with the PCA is due to the few number of cases dealt with between 1946 and 1990 and the closed nature of the cases. Hearings are hardly ever open to the public and sometimes even the decision itself is kept confidential at the request of the parties. The last couple of years the popularity of the PCA is increasing again. The border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea was one of the big cases in 2003 that put the existence of the PCA back into the international limelight.
