Diplomatic note in the context of soft law and sources of international law

Abstract

Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice contains legal instruments, which the Court will employ to interpret and judge. This article is basis for the positivist theory on the sources of international law considered also as paradigm. Emergence of the legal phenomenon called “soft law, whereby many scholars recognized new sources in international law, specifically resolutions of international organizations and unilateral acts of States. Recently the European Court of Human Rights stated that the diplomatic note should consider as source, so this article focuses on analyzing the context and relevance of it.