Search: self-defense
12 May States Are Failing Us in Syria — Not International Law
...national interests. Why invoke an inherently selfish rationale such as self-defence as a pretext for aggression when you could invoke humanitarian intervention instead? Who is opposed to helping innocent civilians? And if we take your land and oil and other resources along the way, well, we have to pay for our selflessness somehow, don’t we? Legalising UHI, in short, will not lead to more humanitarian uses of force. It will lead to more aggression. And that is because international law is not the problem in Syria and elsewhere. States are....05 Mar AG Holder’s National Security Speech – Text
Mihai Martoiu Ticu As long as I can't sue U.S. in any international court for killing me, killing me remains illegal. JordanPaust Response... As we thought, self-defense targeting and law of war principles; but the Administration still believes that the U.S. can be at "war" with a mere terrorist organization that does not even reach the status of an "insurgency," much less a "belligerency" under international law. As noted in my article on Self-Defense Targeting, the U.S. does not need to use the war paradigm when the self-defense paradigm is...10 Dec Obama’s Hawkish Nobel Lecture
...legitimacy of future interventions, no matter how justified. / And this becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor." His embrace of defensive use of force thus doesn't strike me as either novel or worrying per se, although Obama didn't go on to offer his interpretation of self-defence - nonetheless, I don't think he understands it as broadly as the Bush administration did (but we will probably get a clearer picture with the Quadrennial Defense Review and...17 Sep Scottish Independence Insta-Symposium: The International Legal Significance of the Scottish Independence Referendum–A Long View
...best appreciated by looking to the history of self-determination. Self-determination has always been a controversial concept. From its earliest days it has been seen as deeply subversive, but it is at once more radical and more modest that is often appreciated. In the first place, although self-determination is intimately connected to secession, the two are not synonymous. I suggest self-determination claims may be subdivided into four categories: political self-determination (often called ‘internal’), secessionary self-determination (‘external’), remedial self-determination (whereby a serious and prolonged denial of political self-determination results in a right...20 Feb Kosovo’s Declaration: Analyzing the Legal Issues of Secession and Recognition
...Supreme Court of Canada grappled with questions of self-determination and secession in re Secession of Quebec. The Canadian court found that: [t]he recognized sources of international law establish that the right to self-determination of a people is normally fulfilled through internal self-determination—a people’s pursuit of its political, economic, social and cultural development within the framework of an existing state. A right to external self-determination (which in this case potentially takes the form of the assertion of a right to unilateral secession) arises only in the most extreme cases and, even...