This valuable handbook, a revised version of a manual originally published in 1999, is one of the products of the establishment in 1997 of the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (PICT), a joint creation of the Center on International Cooperation (CTC) at New York University and the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (FIELD) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Taking account of the enormous increase in recent years in the number of international bodies that may be called ‘tribunals’, of one sort or another, it sets out to make accessible in one exhaustive compilation all useful information relating to virtually every existing international tribunal. In this, it meets a real need; as observed in the introduction, ‘Many academics and practitioners . . . are familiar with selected bodies, but few are informed about the range of international judicial and quasi-judicial bodies now available’ (p. x).

The introduction to the manual further explains that in order to select the information to be included for each tribunal, ‘it was considered appropriate to place oneself in the position of a potential user of the body, or someone who wanted to obtain the most basic information on the various bodies’, and the manual thus ‘seeks to answer the most commonly asked questions’ (p. xvii). Fourteen such questions are identified, including not only the address and contact details, indication of governing instruments, nature of jurisdiction, etc., but also such matters as powers to indicate provisional measures, possibility of third-party intervention, and financial aspects. Despite a disclaimer that the manual ‘does not strive to be comprehensive’, its coverage of tribunals is as complete as any practitioner or researcher could ask for: successive parts cover global courts (ICJ, ITLOS, WTO, DSB); arbitration institutions (PCA, ICSID); international criminal courts and tribunals (ICC, ICTY, ICTR, and the special bodies created for Sierra Leone, Cambodia, and Lebanon); regional economic integration bodies/free-trade agreements (including the European Court of Justice); human-rights bodies (ECHR, Inter-American Court and Commission, UN Human Rights Commission, etc.); inspection, review and compliance mechanisms in international financial institutions; and compliance procedures in multilateral environmental agreements. The last two parts deal with bodies that are, as the introduction to Part VI concedes, not strictly to be categorized as ‘international courts and tribunals’, but, since many internationalists know little about them, their inclusion is to be welcomed. Other arrangements are conceivable (e.g. the WTO system, grouped with ICJ and ITLOS as a global institution, has little institutionally and procedurally in common with those bodies, and might have been placed elsewhere), but what is important is that the structure chosen for the book is clear and its coverage complete.

The various governing documents of each tribunal are not reproduced in extenso, but, at times, the text of the manual is necessarily little more than a reproduction of the terms of such documents, so as to prompt the question as to whether, at least in some cases, a simple reproduction of the instruments, with slight annotation, would have sufficed, even if this compromised the standard pattern of presentation. Any practitioner intending to make use of one of the tribunals, and any researcher wishing to study it in depth, will certainly need to have the texts themselves relating to that body, but most, if not all, of them are, of course, readily available on the Internet. The extent to which the case law of the relevant body is cited to flesh out the procedural rules varies, primarily according to the extent to which such material is available. Extremely useful is the indication where such existing case law is to be found, in a reference section placed at the end of each chapter, along with a brief bibliography.

Each part begins with short introduction and each chapter devoted to a particular tribunal is concluded with an ‘evaluation’, two or three pages long. These latter are valuable to set the particular organ in context, such as by explaining what use has in fact been made of the tribunal and how this relates to the attitude towards it of its potential customers. However, the evaluations are necessarily too brief to give more than a broad picture and differ from the rest of the text in that, to some extent, they inevitably express a personal point of view (though whether this is one held jointly by the four editors or represents the view of only one of them is not made clear), the entirety of which other specialists may not necessarily agree with.

The presentation (printing and binding) is of the high standard to be expected from OUP; the book is a pleasure to handle. There is a substantial index, primarily by organization and procedural concept: in a future edition, it might be helpful to consider including additional entries of a less technical (and perhaps more subjective) kind, on the lines of ‘Individuals, access by’ or ‘Counsel, choice of’, and even ‘Equity’, for example. The typographical arrangement adopted for subdivisions of an index entry is not ideal, since it is sometimes not immediately clear how far an item is indented and therefore whether it is a main heading or a subheading; this may be a source of some confusion and might be reconsidered.

These are points of detail: overall, the authors, and indeed the Project on International Courts and Tribunals, are to be congratulated on a work that fully achieves its stated aim; it goes beyond mere compilation in bringing out parallelisms and contrasts valuable in the study of the theoretical underpinnings of international judicial settlement. It will undoubtedly be a valuable addition to the library of every scholar in this field and of every practitioner involved in international litigation.