International Court of Justice

For those of you who are not particularly interested in the law relating to immunity, I apologise for three consecutive posts on the topic. However, this is a week in which there just happen to have been many developments on this topic. This week Germany has insituted proceedings in the International Court of Justice against Italy (see here) alleging that through its judicial practice Italy has in recently years repeatedly disregarded the jurisdictional immunity due to Germany as a Sovereign State. The Press Release from the ICJ states that, according to the German Application: "The critical stage of that development was reached by the judgment of the Corte di Cassazione of 11 March 2004 in the Ferrini case, where [that court] declared that Italy held jurisdiction with regard to a claim . . . brought by a person who during World War II had been deported to Germany to perform forced labour in the armaments industry. After this judgment had been rendered, numerous other proceedings were instituted…