Fairness and international law : within or without?

Abstract

Starting from a notion of fairness that relies on taking all legitimate interests involved into account, this paper identifies fairness as a regulative idea to assess and criticise the law, but also to apply and to progressively develop it. After addressing ways and means to realise fairness in applying international law and to set it up as a ‘learning system’, it focuses on ‘fairness over space and time’, and asks under which conditions interests of distant strangers and of past and future generations should be taken into account in the application of international law.