Assessing the Effectiveness of International Courts: Can the Unquantifiable Be Quantified?

The experience of social reporting in Italian judicial offices. The laboratory of the public prosecutor’s office in Naples

“…Innovative management processes in court administration are creating in Italy the cultural and organizational prerequisites for the elaboration of social reports, where for social reporting is generally meant the “process of communicating the social and environmental effects of organizations' economic actions to particular interest groups within society and society at large” (Gray et al , 1996). The social report can help in stimulating social awareness because it represents a valuable container of appropriate design, training, implementation and leadership (Daley, 1991) that can make social impact assessments effective, while allowing to anticipate possible unforeseen or unintended outcomes (Shany, 2010). Such report is also called social and environmental report or sustainability report, but it has been observed (Fusco and Ricci, 2019) that these locutions, despite some initial differences, are substantially interchangeable.…”

“…In general, accounting and reporting are powerful tools that have conventionally been used to optimize the performance of organizations. Broader techniques of social and sustainability reporting and accountability have the potential to be effective tools in the management, planning and control of the social and environmental impact (Bebbington et al , 2014) of corporate activities, which in public administrations tend to depend more on their relationships with the external environment compared to private companies, thus making the assessment of their social impact more complex (Shany, 2010). It is also known that “people dislike being judged and criticized” (Paynter and Kearne, 2010) and this is also true in judicial contexts, which are more willing to accept new court management procedures (Guimarães et al , 2011; Jeuland, 2018) rather than trying to measure the social impact of their institutional activity.…”

Addressing Human Rights in the Court of Justice of the Andean Community and the Tribunal of the Southern African Development Community

“…As Thomas Franck argues, the problem with incoherence in the international legal system is that it dampens the legitimacy of the international legal order (Franck 1988). What is more, while the effectiveness of the international legal system may be hard to measure (Shany 2010), it has nonetheless been contended that an incoherent legal system may significantly weaken its effectiveness and validity (Kelsen 1992, 62).…”