General international law in the European Court of Justice: from hypothesis to reality?

There is a considerable amount of literature on the place within the European Community legal order of international agreements concluded by the European Community as well as those concluded by the Member States, and this includes the case-law of the European Court of Justice (hereafter ‘the Court’) on the matter. Similarly, much has been written on the relationship between European Community law and the legal systems of the Member States and on the relationship between international law and national legal systems. In contrast, the place of non-treaty international law within the Community legal order has not been the subject of such extensive analysis, whether in the literature or in the case-law of the Court. It is the treatment by the Court of this kind of international law that is the subject of this paper.