Keynote by Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji

Judge Caribbean Court of Justice, Trinidad and Tobago

No Commerce Without Peace

Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji’s keynote advances a rigorous proposition: commerce is structurally contingent on peace, and law remains among the few normative architectures capable of securing that condition before violence overwhelms social order. The address begins from a stark historical premise, underscoring that when war becomes the dominant condition, industry, navigation, secure exchange, construction, and civic life contract sharply, a reality rendered visible in the ruined morphology of contemporary cities. From that point, the keynote reframes peace as a juridical project by tracking the principle of the peaceful settlement of disputes through foundational sources of international law, including the UN Charter’s dispute-settlement framework, earlier attempts to proscribe war as an instrument of national policy, and treaty traditions that privilege adjudication and lawful process over escalation. The argument then confronts the recurrent claim that international law is impotent or in retreat, and instead posits that periods of acute violence impose a duty of legal innovation rather than resignation. The keynote culminates in a concrete normative direction: peace is treated as a justiciable concept with implementable pathways, including the articulation of a right to peace capable of being advanced through domestic courts and strengthened through cross-border recognition and enforcement, thereby positioning legal process as an active instrument for sustaining the conditions under which commerce can endure.