I have a short – and pretty critical – comment out today on EJILTalk! on last week’s judgments of the International Court of Justice in the Marshall Islands cases against India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom. The Marshall Islands had claimed that the three countries (and other nuclear-weapon states) were violating their international legal obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament. Now the Court, rather unbelievably, finds that the case cannot proceed to the merits as there was no ‘dispute’ between the parties when the application was submitted. A stretch of the meaning of ‘dispute’, as well as a capitulation to the nuclear powers, barely concealed under the veneer of formalist legal reasoning. More on this in post itself.