Ricerc@Sapienza

The indispensable party rule is a procedural condition for the exercise of contentious jurisdiction by international courts and tribunals, and therefore it represents a limit of the judicial function. Its main purpose is to strike a balance between the interests of the parties to a dispute and the interests of third parties absent from the proceedings. The discretion that is implicit in the indispensable party notion explains the flexibility with which international courts and tribunals have applied it.