Separate opinions and declarations: the language choices of judges

Abstract

Traditionally, when countries have disputes, they go to war. Today, instead of resorting to armed force, countries, including member states of ASEAN use language as a dispute resolution mechanism either through diplomatic negotiation or through arbitration or adjudication mechanisms such as the International Court of Justice in The Hague, The Netherlands. This paper draws upon Harre and Davies’s concept of positioning to ascertain propositions expressed implicitly or explicitly in the language choices of three Judges representing the International Court of Justice in the Philippines’ request to intervene in the case between Malaysia and Indonesia concerning sovereignty over Pulau Sipadan and Ligitan. Inherent and crucial in the interpretations of the speech acts is the role of context. Here, context refers to not only the linguistic environment of the utterances but also to social and/or legal assumptions that may not be explicitly stated in the data. Data for this paper is extracted from the separate opinions and declarations of Judges Kooijmans, Koroma and Franck in the final judgement regarding the case of Philippines’ intervention in Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s dispute over the two islands.