Remarks by the Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at the Federalist Society's Annual Lawyers Convention

Chertoff addresses International Law and how it affects the US and other coutries:

In 2004, the International Court of Justice waded into a thicket that is probably one of the most difficult of all in the area of international relations, and that has to do with Israel and its activities in the West Bank of the Jordan River. There, in a case entitled Legal Consequences of Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the ICJ issued a very broad advisory opinion concluding that the construction of a wall that was specifically designed to keep suicide bombers out of Israel, where they were blowing up people on a regular basis, violated international law, had to be dismantled, and reparations had to be made because the wall was put up.

Part of that reasoning process was the ICJ concluding that Israel could not use the threat of terrorist attacks emanating for the Palestinian territories to justify the wall because the attacks were not attributed to a state. In other words, using what I would consider a very hyper-technical reading, the court was relatively dismissive of what most of us would regard as a very compelling, fundamental attribute of state sovereignty -- the right to protect your citizens from being killed by people coming in from outside.

And I think this sequence of decisions shows an increasing tendency to look to rather generally described and often ambiguous "universal norms" to trump domestic prerogatives that are very much at the core of what it means to live up to your responsibility as a sovereign state. Now who interprets these laws? Of course, to the extent we're dealing with the text of treaties, if this country is party to a treaty we have consented to it -- if it's been ratified by the Senate -- and it's fair that we live up to the letter of the agreement we have signed.

But often the letter of the agreement is not what controls; it is, in fact, what we have not agreed to that people seek to impose upon us. And of course this begins with the judges and justices of various international courts, not, of course, appointed by or ratified by our legal -- our political process, that looks to customary international law, that is often considered to be described by what they say are the opinions of international law experts. That basically means professors.