LESSON 5:

CONTEMPORARY
GLOBAL
GOVERNANCE
Read the News Article: ICC Is
Investigating Duterte, Who
Suddenly Wants Out
Answer the check up questions:
1. What did you feel after reading the news article?
2. Is the move of President Duterte relevant to the
country? Why or why not?
3. Share with the class your impressions with the news
article presented.
4. As a Filipino citizen, would you support Duterte’s
move of withdrawing Philippines from ICC? Defend
your answer.
Globalization is a rich and a broad
concept and may be defined in
various perspectives.
It cannot be denied that globalization
has made a tremendous impact on the
sovereign state.
Fowler and Bunck (1996)
emphasized that a sovereign state has
a territory, the people, and a
government.
Any state admitted as a member of the
United Nations will be upon the
decision of the General Assembly as
recommended by the Security Council.
The United Nations membership
requirements are (1) the state must be a
peace-loving state which accepts the
obligations contained in the present
Charter, and (2) in the judgment of the
Organization, must be able and willing
to carry out these obligations.
Chapter 2, Article 4 of the United
Nations Charter states that only
sovereign states can become
members of the United Nations.
Although all UN members are fully
sovereign states at the present, the
Belarus, India, Philippines, and
Ukraine- four of the original
members- were not independent at
the time of their admission in the
organization.
Even from the seventeenth century,
the legal framework of a sovereign
state has served as a definitive ground
for political governance and economic
system.
Sovereignty has been constitutionally
used both on national and international
levels. The intercontinental spread of
capital and the formation of global
markets have eventually substituted
the fragmented national economies.
Sovereign states are experiencing
increased difficulties in supplying
regulatory and redistributive public
goods and establishing and enforcing
property rights in the face of relatively
open trade, rapid information-
technology advances, and considerable
financial deregulation.
Moreover, both market relations and
political discontent with economic
policies have virtually become
“borderless.”
The international system has
now become less state-centric
that makes a way into the
political constitution of domestic
policies.
Notably, the advancements in
technology and its innovations
have increased the speed of the
migration and transplantation of
legal rules and policies.
The transnational actors, which are
non-state, such as the intergovernmental
organizations (IGOs), international
nongovernmental organizations
(INGOs), and transnational corporations
(TNCs) have assumed relevant roles in
global governance.
They have created transnational law
that runs many dimensions of the
political economy that was once
governed by the sovereign states.
Sovereignty is at the heart of both
public international law and the legal
constitution of the state. Relevant
changes in the international system
definitely affect the shape of
sovereignty and the future of the state
law.
However today, any sovereign state
cannot just neglect issues that are
related to the interests of the humanity,
may they be within the borders or
outside the borders of the state.
Individuals and groups enjoy
greater recognition as subjects of
international law, as seen in the
expansion of legal regimes and
enforceable mechanisms in the
fields of international human
rights law, international refugee
law, international criminal law,
and the like.
Victor Peskin observes that the United Nations
Security Council's ad hoc tribunals for the
former Yugoslavia and Rwanda continued to
trump state sovereignty insofar as targeted
states and all other UN members were legally
bound to comply. However, the development of
international criminal tribunals suggests a
changing balance of tribunal authority and
state sovereignty.
He criticizes the next generation of war crimes
tribunals as supporting the expansion of the
influence of state judicial actors as well as the
strengthening of the doctrine of sovereignty.
The Rome statute of the International
Criminal Court (ICC) upholds the
principle of complementarities and
recognizes that states do not have to
collaborate with the court unless they
have ratified the statute. However, this is
only part of the picture.
The decisions of international judges and
prosecutors now permeate and shape the
domestic criminal law of these countries.
William Burke-White further
asserts that the ICC has
become part of a system of
multilevel global governance
through its alteration of state
preferences and policies and
its deterrence of future crimes
through judicial and
prosecutorial pronouncements.
International law has evolved into a
central framework for the emergent
system of global governance.
This system supplies the normative
mechanisms for the establishment of
IGOs and the facilitation of the
international response to issues as
diverse as nuclear proliferation,
climate change, ocean use, and the
functioning of the world trade
system.
Alexandra Khrebtukova insightfully
points out, “[n]ational borders no
longer confine the diverse views that
prioritize subjects of international law
… . different perspectives are often
less identifiable with specific states
than with discrete branches of the
law, each manifesting separate
functional perceptions of what that
law should take as its primary focus.
A sovereign state and its laws are
changing; they are transforming
according to their relevance to the
international system.
A state may, in some point in time,
opt to comply with the international
and transnational standards.
However, the adaptive power of
the state law should not be
underestimated.
Generally speaking, the laws that
govern the sovereign state are strong
and flexible enough to endure the
many challenges along the way.
Even with globalization around, the
laws are here to stand firm on the
political influence over the lives of
sovereign state’s people and the
majority of peoples around the globe.