| Studies of the International Law Commission of the United Nations have focused exclusively on the institutional level of analysis, contending that the Commission can best be understood by examining institutional factors such as the Statute of the Commission, the role of the General Assembly and the issues adopted by the Commission for consideration. Implicit in the literature is the assumption that Law Commission members function in a political vacuum, little influenced by the policies of home governments or events in the international arena.; This dissertation seeks to examine external factors that influence the functioning of the Law Commission in its debate-oriented process of codifying international law. The theory advanced in this study posits that factors external to the Law Commission are influential in the Law Commission's progression towards consensus on legal issues. Two factors are examined: (1) regional blocs, and (2) the international environment, conceptualized in terms of the imposition of the cold war and its end. As such, this study fills an existing gap in the literature and challenges the core assumptions of the literature.; The case study for examining the role of external factors in the Law Commission is the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind. The case selection is considered optimal because it incorporates multiple legal issues (including genocide, mercenarism, colonial domination, apartheid, economic aggression and statute of an international tribunal), rendering its findings more generalizable and less topic bound than other Law Commission issues. The case study is of interest, as well, due to the dramatic rise in calls for the prosecution of alleged war criminals, a process contingent on the Draft Code.; A data base is constructed from Law Commission debate, from which content analysis is undertaken. Ten hypotheses test the relationship between Law Commission debate and factors external to the Commission. Support for the hypotheses indicate the influential role of international politics on the Law Commission and provide evidence of the need for more systematic, data base-oriented studies in the literature. |
