Jessup Moot Court Team 2022/23

The Jessup Experience

The Jessup Moot Court is a public international law competition that simulates a fictional dispute between states before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the judicial organ of the United Nations. Teams from over 100 countries compete through the presentation of oral and written arguments to address timely issues in the context of a hypothetical interstate dispute.

Since Jena had not fielded a team for seveeral years, it came as a nice change that this year, for the first time again, four ‘agents’, with the support of their ‘coaches’, entered the arena for the FSU at the national rounds in Berlin.

Preparation

After the four of us (Anna Lochte, Saskia Hitschold, Paul Naumann and Katharina Preller) had been selected for the team through an application process and interviews with our future coaches in July, the competition began in early September 2022. This was when the ‘Compromis’ a compilation of agreed facts that described the dispute we would deal with was released by ILSA, the competition’s organiser. It described a fictive conflict located on the ‘Gais Peninsular’, where the State of Ragnell had deployed its military in a territory it had leased from the Federation of Balan. Before that, freedom fighters – or terrorists, depending on who you ask – had launched attacks against Ragnell, their belligerent occupant, or lawful lessee – again, depending on where you stand. The third country on the island, the Kingdom of Aglovale, became indirectly affected when hostilities escalated into an armed conflict between Ragnell and the insurgents. With the intention of forcing an end to the conflict, Aglovale imposed sanctions on Ragnell.

Ultimately, Aglovale and Ragnell filed a suit against each other, and our team had to prepare to represent them in court. We began researching and preparing arguments, drafting and editing written pleadings, and practicing oral presentations to defend both states. After long nights and intense days, our team finally submitted two fifty-page-long defense statements in January. In those documents, the representatives of Ragnell framed the military attack as an act of self-defense in line with the United Nations Charter, whereas the representative of Aglovale framed it as an act of aggression, violating the Charter. While the sanctions were unjustified coercive measures breaching the principle of non-intervention for Ragnell, they were legal countermeasures according to Aglovale.

The preparation sparked a variety of debates as the dispute partly resembled current conflicts: not only concerning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the subsequent EU sanctions, but also with regard to ongoing occupations in Western Sahara and the Middle East, and the use of military forces to control non-state actors in Mexico. We were confronted with a row of unsettled hypothetical questions of international law: Can a third state bring a dispute before the court on behalf of another state? Should the ICJ adjudicate questions pertaining to the law of the World Trade Organization? Often no ultimate answers can be found to those complex issues.

In the next phase, we focused on how to improve our oral performance. Persuasiveness, composure and politeness are all crucial competencies needed in order to convince judges during the pleadings. Agents are requested to present their claims in a limited time, while being permanently interrupted with questions, thus a lot of preparation went into refining our knowledge of public international law.

Apart from the many practice sessions we had with our coaches, we also had the opportunity to take part in a practice pleading with Dr. Richard Happ from the Luther law firm and a dress rehearsal before professors of the faculty, the latter of which was also attended by many spectators and served as a final test for our skills before the actual competition. Both pleadings gave us ample opportunity to test our arguments before new audiences and we are very grateful for the support of all practice judges.

The Competition

The luggage was packed, the shirts ironed and the folders full of material, when we rolled towards Berlin on 2 March 2023 to compete against other German universities. At the welcome reception at the Hertie School of Governance we had the opportunity to meet the other teams and some of the judges and organizers for the first time. Later in the evening we received the written submissions of the other universities against whom we would compete over the course of the next two days. Immediately, we started to review them, trying to identify weak arguments or errors. It turned out, more than once, that the other teams took very different roads to defend their states, making it difficult to counter their arguments under time pressure. On Thursday and Friday we competed four times in total, and in each round, we collected points and received feedback from professional lawyers and academics who acted as judges.

On Friday evening we finally learned which of the 17 teams would advance to the next rounds. Before that, the Federal Minister of Justice gave a speech on the increasing importance of public international law and how it affected his line of work specifically. When the advancing teams were announced, Jena was sadly not among them.

The next day, the final rounds took place and although we did not compete ourselves, we, and all the other teams who had not advanced to this point, took the opportunity to observe the final match in the Kammergericht in Berlin, an impressive match in which the participants showed their strong legal knowledge before judges from the ICJ and the Germon Constitutional Court, like Prof. Georg Nolte and Prof. Andreas Paulus. At the closing event on Saturday, the three winning teams, which would advance to the International Rounds in Washington D.C. were announced as were the awards for best oralists, best memorials and many more. Although we did not reach one of the most coveted places, we did bring home the award for the most balanced team, which honors our fair play. We spent the rest of the evening celebrating with other teams and returned to Jena the next day.

For all of us, Jessup was a thrilling experience, and we highly encourage you to also use this opportunity, if you want to improve your skills in research, legal writing, and oral advocacy.

We are very thankful for all the support and commitment of our coaches Maximilian Beyer, Maira Müller and Polina Kulish, the suggestions from Prof. Alejandro Rodiles and the generous financial support from the Ernst-Abbe-Foundation, without which our participation would not have been possible.

If you are interested in participating in the next Jessup competition for our university, please send an e-mail to Maximilian Beyer (maximilian.beyer@uni-jena.de).