Activity 10: The International Court of Justice
Web Pages or Blog
In this activity the students will complete their research and select all the pictures and graphics they may need to complete either a web site or a series of Internet Blog pages. Instructions have been included to direct students through a Web Quest and attain the information they will need to complete this activity.
Focus
The International Court of Justice, established in 1946, has been asked by the United Nations to make rulings on the legality of such issues like the building of the security wall in the Occupied Territories. The rulings of the international court are not binding, but do provide the legal framework for other bodies like the United Nations to declare certain acts as illegal. The authority of international bodies is limited by their ability to enforce their findings. If there is not an international will to force a nation to act in a certain way, these rulings act as notice that an illegal act is occurring.
The following will assist the students in examining the role and effectiveness of the International Court of Justice.
• What is the International Court of Justice?
• What authority does the international court have?
• What does the International Court of Justice base its findings on? [conventions, treaties, etc.]
• If there are limited ways to enforce the findings of the international court should it exist?
• What are some examples of rulings by the International Court of Justice involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
• What were some of the effects of the International Court of Justice ruling involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
• Are there ways to make the International Court of Justice more effective?
To complete this project the students will use the information in this Edukit and carry out a web quest to find what they will need. The students will find the graphics and images they will use in this Edukit. Students may also find information they need to complete this activity on the Internet.
Download the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the Teacher’s section of this Edukit and make it available to the students with explanation so that they know exactly what human rights are. Emphasis that human rights relate to the way people can live their daily lives and they are not abstractions. Using this framework, students will be able to identify and discuss issues of human rights violations with clarity.
Web Quest
A Web Quest is the process of finding the information the students need to complete a project from sources on the World Wide Web. To find the information students want from the Internet they will have to use a search engine. A search engine is a program available on the Internet that directs the searcher to the websites that has the information that they have asked for.
One of the most commonly used search engines is: http://www.google.ca/
The students completing a search will place key words, names, or dates in this box and click on the search button. After that the students will receive a list of websites that have the exact word they asked for in them.
The better the students are at asking for information the better their result will be. If the searchers use a series of key words they will get a better result. To force the search engine to show only result that have the selected words in them use the + sign in front of the words, names, or dates. For example, the students may want to type in Palestine and the date 1995, but to make these terms appear type: +Palestine +1995. If the researchers do not want to see a word in a web site they can use the “-” sign. So if they want to remove websites that mention war, the student would type +Palestine +1995 –war in the search engine.
In another case the students may want to use the phrase human rights, but the words should appear together for the best results, so they will type “human rights” in the search engine.
Putting the Project together as a Webpage
The students will decide what questions will be answered on each webpage or poster.
Once the students’ posters or web pages have been completed they will be posted and shared with the rest of their classmates.
Making Blog pages
Blog pages can include images, graphics, or maps as well as writing. The following is an example of what the students Blog page may look like. The students can either assemble their project on several pages, like several pages in a Blog, or as posters.
