MR Topliss asks some pertinent questions about international law (Letters, May 2). Let me endeavour to answer them.

There are two main sources of international law which correspond to the two main sources of domestic law: common law and statute law.

International humanitarian law in its relation to warfare is largely the product of Catholic jurists from the early middle ages onwards, who were working in the Catholic Just War tradition, which stipulated that if a country engaged in war it had to have a just cause and conduct the war by just means.

A 16th century jurist condemned Henry V’s order to slaughter the French prisoners at Agincourt, using the principle of just means, for example. Civilians had to be protected as far as possible.

Though the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals can be criticised as an example of victors’ justice, they did lay down certain principles: the duty of disobedience to clearly illegal orders, for example. In international law, nobody is outside the protection of the law, and that protection cannot be forfeited (the police are no more entitled to beat up a suspected serial killer than a wholly innocent member of the public).

Despite all the problems, there is a growing awareness of the necessity of, at least, trying to bring order to what is still a largely anarchic world by means of law.

Hence the establishment of the World Court. As British citizens, our principal duty is to monitor what our own government, and those with whom it is allied, gets up to.

It is easy to condemn the Pol Pots and the Saddam Husseins, but such condemnation, however necessary, cannot be our prime concern.

We do not live or pay taxes in Cambodia or Iraq.

Malcolm Pittock
St James Avenue
Breightmet