The Role of Good Administration of Justice in Admitting Untimely and Informal Documents before the International Court of Justice

The time factor plays a crucial role in fact-finding before the Court, where it counterbalances the general principle of freedom of admissibility, particularly with regard to documentary evidence. The only admissibility criteria set be the ICJ’s legal framework, indeed, relates to the form of the document and the time of its submission. Both these criteria, however, admit exceptions which, interestingly, are regulated, either implicitly or explicitly, by the idea of good administration of justice. The purpose of this article is then to investigate the relationship between the idea of a justice properly administered and the use of informal and untimely documents, in order to highlight which function is currently played by the notion in the specific context of documentary fact-finding.