Welcome to the latest interview of the Völkerrechtsblog’s symposium ‘The Person behind the Academic’! With us we have Judge Iulia Motoc, and through the following questions, we will try to get a glimpse of her interests, sources of inspiration and habits.
Welcome Judge Motoc and thank you very much for accepting our invitation!
Thank you very much for inviting me. Congratulations for this wonderful idea on the symposium.
May I first ask what it was that brought you to academia and what made you stay?
I always wanted to be an academic. I have not always wanted to become a lawyer. I studied in a mathematics-physics high school and prepared for medicine, and then for philosophy. I finished high school in the last years of a communist totalitarian regime, in which if you failed the entrance exam to university you were obliged to work in a factory. The requirements for the Faculty of Philosophy had changed a few months before admission and so I ended up studying law. Academia, the garden situated in or near an olive grove dedicated to the goddess Athena, remains my ideal place, the place of contemplation and deep thought.
What would you say is the most difficult part of the academic life?
With Homo academicus, Pierre Bourdieu presents a sociological study that deals with the representation, position and distribution of power of academics in the social space. In this space every academic has a position that affects him, for example, his political position. Academics denouncing student movements would find themselves in the same place in the hall. The academics who support these movements are in a completely different part of the room. These ideological differences have sometimes insurmountable barriers.
In the terms of Michel Foucault, one of Pierre Bourdieu’s contemporaries, I always find it difficult to deal with power. The academic world of international law, be it a conceptual one, is now more influenced by the common law system, in the way of legal thinking and drafting in international law or the concentration in the hands of some highly influential academics, “le barreau invisible” and the lack of access to resources for research by the academics of some countries.
If you were not an academic (and now a judge of the ICC), what would you be?
Isaiah Berlin divides writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who look at the world through the prism of a single defining idea, for example, Plato or Marcel Proust, and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be summed up to a single idea (Aristotle or Johann Wolfgang Goethe). If we were to propose mutatis mutandis this distinction to the academic world, I would certainly be among those for whom the world cannot be summed up in a single idea, the fox.
I started practicing law relatively young, as a UN expert in human rights working with such different topics as indigenous populations, the prohibition of slavery, extreme poverty, genetics. I was the special rapporteur for the violation of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So, I have always been something other than an academic; before I was a judge of the ICC, I was a judge at the Constitutional Court of Romania and at the European Court of Human Rights.
If I were not an academic in this field, I would be an academic perhaps in philosophy or medicine.
What are three texts that you would wish all academics working on international law would read?
Oppenheim, ‘International Law: A Treatise’
Georges Scelle, ‘Precis de droit international’
Diana Botau, Valentin Constantin, ‘Drept international public (International public law); I hope one day it will be translated.
Would you say that your upbringing has had an impact on your research interests or your perception of justice?
My existence and vision of life were determined by the fact that until the age of 22, I lived in a communist totalitarian regime, a regime that has been researched very little. I wrote about this regime and the fact that it already lost its political legitimacy on a radical economic and sociological reform in favour of the working classes in the 60s. This political legitimacy of the communist regime had been in practice replaced with another type of legitimacy of the regime. Among other things, it encouraged aesthetic values at the expense of ethical ones, in a phenomenological grid. My generation tried to reunite aesthetics with ethics, but I don’t know how successful we were.
I grew up in a house full of books; my father was a university professor and my mother a philologist. Beyond the impetuous need for justice that a totalitarian regime gives you, books formed my need for justice. To nameonly a few literary books: Albert Camus, ‘The Stranger’; Dostoevsky, ‘Crime and Punishment’; Faulkner, ‘The Sound and the fury; Sabato, ‘On Heroes and Tombs’; Elfride Jellinek ‘Women as Lovers’; Annie Ernaux, ‘Les Années’; Mircea Cartarescu, ‘Nostalgia’; Mario Vargas Llosa ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’; and the philosophers Plato, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.
What is your favourite place to read and write? What is always near you when you read and write?
I have lived in many cities and countries. I read and write anywhere. I like places with a view, from the gardens of Bucharest where I grew up, to the gardens in Strasbourg where the ECtHR is, to the perspective on Manhattan from a skyscraper in New York where I lived for a few years. Now, because I live in The Hague, the “View of Delft”.
What is an energy and inspiration booster, at times when you have none?
Classical music, almost everything played by Marta Argerich, and more recently, since I live so far from home, the music of the young generation in Romania.
Have you ever drawn influence from any form of art in your work? Is there anything artistic about teaching or writing academic texts?
Art has always been at the center of my existence, perhaps from my earliest memories. I wrote poems long before I got into law. I think I have many references to literature in my academic texts but also in my separate opinions. Paintings, music and to a certain extent cinema have shaped me as much as law.
Which of your academic publications is your favourite one? And which of them is your least favourite?
Perhaps us university professors tend to believe most of our lives that we are yet to write our best publication. If I had to choose, my best text will be my first Ph.D thesis” L’interprétation de l’article 2&4 de la Charte ONU devant le Conseil de securité”.
The texts I like the least are the ones where I didn’t manage to express exactly what I wanted to say.
Which advice would you give to early career scholars reading this interview?
To be curious, to read also as much as they can, in as many fields as possible. I belong to those who believe that the strict principle of specialization is not beneficial, not even in law.
Have you experienced or witnessed discrimination in academic circles? How have you reacted to these instances?
When I was selected, following the law school results, to study abroad as a recipient of a scholarship from the French government, I was a judge. The then Minister of Justice, in1990, said that “two men” should go in my place and that of a colleague. Although, as I said, I had access to many books of philosophy or literature, I had no knowledge of human rights at all, I did not know the concept of discrimination based on gender. However, I managed to get a meeting and convince the minister that meritocratic criteria must also be followed.
Of course, Eastern Europe, where I come from, can be seen as a periphery, and you could be stigmatized even in the academy. I have always campaigned for an inclusive academic Europe, but I have never felt discriminated against.
Would you like to share with us a ‘sacrifice’ that you have made for your work? Do you regret it?
I think I knew from the beginning of my conscious existence that there are certain things I could not have. I don’t know if this can be called a sacrifice.
Ideally, whom would you want to find waiting for a meeting with you outside your office next Monday?
Right now, my friends and colleagues from the Romanian academia and judiciary, the Institute of International, the European Court of Human Rights, my former students from the Hague Academy of International law during that summer and, here in The Hague, the ICJ Judge Hilary Charlesworth.
Thank you very much, Judge Motoc, for participating in our symposium and for having taken the time to respond to our questions!
Thank you very much for having me. Answering your questions was a real pleasure.
