Customary International Law (CIL), an integral part of Public International Law, has played its own role in Indian judicial discourse. Though not prominently and explicitly recognized as a part of Indian domestic law, CIL has been incorporated into Indian discourse via various case laws by Indian courts of law. This article analyses the circumstances and motives under which such incorporation has been done by the Indian judiciary. This article describes the importance of employing the principles of CIL into Indian domestic legal system and its imminent necessary in certain areas. The article also studies the previous landmark judgements delivered by the Indian judiciary, in which the principles of CIL are used to bring in a progressive thought and to uphold the fundamental rights of Individuals, guaranteed by the Constitution of India. This article also examines the careful and minimal way in which the courts proceeded to use the principles of CIL and other statutes and treaties of Public International Law (PIL) to support their stance in particular verdicts that went on to become bases for many other verdicts which continue to uphold the rights of people of India. The article makes an effort to comment on whether this way of using the principles of CIL and PIL as such is beneficial to our legal system or should the courts try a novel way.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.