Organizzazione internazionale, codificazione e cognizione del diritto internazionale non scritto

This article examines the historical and conceptual bond between international organisation, codification, and the cognition of unwritten law. It argues that the now familiar idea of codification as the written expression of customary international law is neither obvious nor original, but the product of a relatively recent development. In the absence of a universal legislature, codification in international law was long drawn towards the register of veritas rather than that of auctoritas: it presupposed a pre-existing general law capable of being known and transcribed by jurists. Yet customary law proved an unstable foundation for that ambition, since its empirical traceability coexists with the impossibility of any truly objective protocol for its identification. The article traces the resulting oscillation between truth and authority through the interwar codification debates, the role of scientific bodies such as the Institut de Droit international and the International Law Association, and the rise of the International Law Commission. It also examines the ILC’s fraught treatment of dissenting opinions, showing how the effort to suppress or marginalise internal disagreement formed part of a broader shift from scientific self-understanding to institutional self-assertion. The article concludes that the ILC’s later trajectory reveals both the persistence of this tension and the gradual exhaustion of the old belief that codification could outmanoeuvre state power through the supposed knowability of unwritten law.