The Bilingual Ontology of the UN Charter, Interpretive Divergence Between English and French Rationalities in ICJ Jurisprudence

The bilingual structure of the United Nations Charter generates distinct legal meanings that significantly affect the International Court of Justice's application of the prohibition of force and self defense. This study hypothesizes that lexical and syntactic divergences between the English and French versions reflect two legal epistemic traditions, namely Anglo Saxon pragmatism oriented toward functional effectiveness and Romano Germanic normativism oriented toward principled coherence. However, as will be elaborated, these are deployed as analytical "ideal types" rather than fixed empirical essences, recognizing the fluid nature of judicial reasoning in practice. The ICJ's jurisprudence reveals a gradual gravitation toward restrictive readings that align with the French conceptual apparatus in delimiting 'armed attack' under Article 51. Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative hermeneutic analysis that integrates textual comparison, historical reconstruction of drafting intent, and systematic examination of ICJ jurisprudence from Nicaragua to Ukraine. This hermeneutic framework complements the positive law rules of the Vienna Convention, enriching the positivist analysis without displacing it. The analysis demonstrates that the Court favors restrictive interpretations privileging normative coherence over functional expediency, as evident in its insistence that self-defense requires a high threshold of gravity. This attraction is not a linguistic preference for French but a structural consequence of the Charter's internal logic as a system of exceptions requiring narrow interpretation to preserve the prohibition of force. The alignment with the French apparatus reflects a convergence of the Court's methodology with the normative density of the French legal tradition, a tension vividly reflected in separate and dissenting opinions. The Charter thus emerges as a dialogical space constituting an ontological condition for international law's legitimacy. Future research should expand the linguistic scope to other authentic languages and examine similar divergences in other treaties.