When engaging in interpretation, Human Rights Bodies (HRBs) may follow specific methods of treaty interpretation – including those derived from Articles 31–31 VCLT – or not. Moreover, the interpretative pronouncements of HRBs may themselves be considered authoritative pronouncements for the purpose of subsequent interpretation of human rights treaties or other sources of human rights law, frequently under the framework of ’pronouncements of expert bodies’. Such pronouncements may then be considered by interpreters as examples of either subsequent practice in the interpretation of treaties within the meaning of Articles 31-32 VCLT, or as ‘subsidiary means’ for the determination of rules of international law in the sense of Article 38 ICJ Statute. In light of this, and given expertise and volume of interpretative pronouncements of HRBs they need to be taken seriously when it comes to the determination of content of human rights rules. However, at present it is not yet clear whether these pronouncements can be relied on as means of interpretation via the formal avenues available in international law.

This chapter examines several individuals and groups associated with the court of the Sasanian king Khusrō I (r. 531–79), detailing their respective religious and philosophical orientations, and the historical connections among them. The people in focus include, among others, Burzōy, author of the Vorlage for Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīla and Dimna, the Neoplatonists who supposedly left the Academy at Athens for the Sasanian court, and Khusrō I himself. While it is unlikely that the commonalities among these thinkers’ views are rooted in a shared debt or adherence to a specific tradition or school, they do attest to a broader philosophical and more specifically epistemological ferment in the later Sasanian empire, which continued into the time of Muslim rule.

In this chapter I examine the lives and oeuvres of several medical authors active in the late Sasanian and early Islamic periods, and advocates for substantial adjustments to the scholarly consensus regarding the identities and works of these pivotal figures. Thus I bring into focus not only these individual authors’ contexts and contributions, but also the larger medical traditions to which they belonged, and hence the background for the emergence of the Bukhtīshūʿs and other physicians from Gondēšāpūr in the early Abbasid period.

This chapter focuses on the historical accounts dealing with the Sasanian empire’s physicians and medical institutions, and their relationship to the Sasanian dynasty. These accounts’ contents and the fact of their circulation reflect the proliferating and strengthening ties between Sasanian rulers and their realm’s physicians in the sixth and seventh centuries, which both parties viewed as beneficial and made efforts to make known. My analysis also yields a somewhat reconfigured understanding of Gondēšāpūr’s medical-historical importance, which builds on arguments advanced by Vittorio Berti: that while Gondēšāpūr’s broader region of Khuzestan was already home to a well-known tradition of medical learning by the time of Khusrō I (and possibly substantially earlier), the emergence of Gondēšāpūr as the region’s preeminent medical center was a comparatively late development, which may have only occurred in the waning decades of Sasanian rule.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the guardian of international law. Therefore, the Commentaries to the Geneva Conventions produced by the ICRC present an authoritative guidance on how these treaties are to be interpreted. In this sense, the ICRC represents an actor whose interpretation is authoritative on its substantive merit. A study of the interpretative methodology behind the Commentaries of the ICRC reveals that although the methodology has evolved it has done so apace with the evolution of the rules of treaty interpretation in general public international law – culminating in the adoption of the VCLT. This is argued to be decisive proof that the rules of international humanitarian law are subject to the same interpretive rules as other international rules.

International law, like any other legal system, must ensure legal certainty. This task is all the more important for international law in light of the constant criticism advanced towards the nature of this legal system. One of the key tools to ensure legal certainty is a consistent and coherent application of rules based on a method of interpretation, where that method serves as the backbone of a judgement. The legal system and an act of application of a specific rule gain persuasiveness and legitimacy where the use of the method of interpretation of a rule is consistent from one case to another. Judges are the guarantors of the resilience of law in the sense that it is in their power to ensure its impartial and uniform application, which in turn counters allegations of inefficiency or bias of that system of law. All these considerations about the systemic features of interpretation and the role of judges as interpreters play toward at least a perception of the rule of law in the legal system. Therefore, the general rule of interpretation of international law is a central element in the international rule of law.