Search: self-defense

...a global perspective, the brief career of human rights in the 1940s is the story of how the Allied nations elevated language about human rights as they reneged on the earlier wartime promise—made in the 1941 Atlantic Charter—of the self-determination of peoples. Global self-determination would have spelled the end of empire, but by war’s end the Allies had come around to Winston Churchill’s clarification that this promise applied only to Hitler’s empire, not empire in general (and certainly not Churchill’s). The Atlantic Charter set the world on fire, but because...

states self-referring is mostly pre-occupied with motives of these states that scholars often miss the value of this developing state practice. As it is incontestable that states self-referral of cases amplifies the aims of the Rome Statute, to end impunity and activates the complementarity provisions under the statue as a cohesive unity of purpose between the ICC and its member states (Prosecutor v. Katanga and Chui and Prosecutor v. Lubanga). A weakness of the book, if any, is that while Ba focuses on the motives of Uganda’s Museveni, there is...

...integrity or political independence of States. Self defence is an exception under Article 51; and and actions authorized by the Security Council are deliberately narrow (see UNSC Res 678 (1990), UN Doc S/RES/678 ; UNSC Res 1973 (2011), UN Doc S/RES/1973). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has consistently interpreted the “inherent right” of self defence under Article 51 in the decisions of Nicaragua v United States and Iran v United States only arising “if an armed attack occurs” requiring a threshold of gravity, necessity and proportionality. The architecture of...

...support for a policy if foreign countries have adopted or global institutions have recommended the policy. Second, the data are based on self-reported levels of information. And, we can easily imagine that self-understanding and self-reporting of one’s own awareness of social policy is systematically skewed (e.g., in favor of reporting overconfidence generally, over- or under-reporting confidence among particular types of individuals). Third, cases in which low-information subjects responded more strongly may mask a spurious correlation. That is, another factor—e.g., lack of concern about the social policy—might lead both to individuals’...

...ICJ did in relation to Israel’s violation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination), when would a vessel transporting military equipment to that State be regarded as complicit or also engaged in the threat or use of force in violation of self-determination? This question, which is not the focus of this piece, is discussed in the legal opinion of ASCOMARE and is independent of the arguments made above. Regardless of what the threshold is or should be for a vessel to be regarded as violating principles of international...

...each group acquired rights which it could not be forced to renounce.” (UN Doc. A/C.1/SR.127, 27 April 1948, p. 108). The Palestinian state established over the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza strip, is in exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination as recognized by the international community. The right of self-determination is widely acknowledged as a peremptory norm of international law. Only the Palestinian people and their political representatives have a legally valid claim to any part of these territories....

...as a shapeless abstraction which claimants of all kinds can shape Humpty-Dumpty-like to the needs of their particular causes). Palestine is the last of the Non-Self-Governing territories recognized as such at the inception of the UN. The others have experienced some process of self-determination, even if nothing more than “one person, one vote, once.” In the case of Palestine, the appropriate organ of the UN, the General Assembly, concluded (in 1947) that there were two People ( a politically sensible simplification, of course) in the territory and that in the...

...justified, but his actions do not help him achieve his desired end. He finds himself a miserable, melancholy knave. This scene from Hamlet came to mind yesterday when I attended a fascinating conference at UCLA on the topic of “rogue states.” After listening to the discussion, I could not help but pity (and fear) the poor rogue state. They are full to the brim with self-pity, and self-doubt, utterly consumed by their weakness. Exhibit One was North Korea. The former Thai Foreign Minister, Kantathi Suphamongkhon, presented a wonderful series of...

...self-determination, the right to vote and take part in public affairs, and the prohibition of discrimination. As a fundamental rule of international law proclaimed in the UN Charter, human rights agreements and international customary law, self-determination gives peoples the right to ‘freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (Art. 1). The internal aspect of self-determination ‘implies meaningful participation in the process of government’ (p 30). Some scholars have relied on self-determination to argue that in the post-conflict situation there is a need to...

...finding was exceptional; the only reported example of a successful defence argument in the 15 volumes. In another similar example where self-defence was attempted [Hangobl, vol. 14], involving an airman who had bailed from a faltering plane and found himself in Austrian territory in 1944, and a civilian who was part of the local defence force found him, the defendant reported that on seeing the airman reach towards his jacket, him shot him once as he faced him and once in the back as the airman turned to run away....

...self-governance from partisan politics. Rather, I argue, self-governance mechanisms that are representative of the judiciary as a whole – not exclusively judges from the highest courts – are an understudied but important feature of institutional design in post-authoritarian transitions. More specifically, I argue that the concept of judicial “independence” should include independence from elite capture when transitioning from the rule of the few to the rule of the many. When mechanisms of judicial self-governance – such as judicial councils that govern appointments, promotions and discipline of judges – are dominated...

...perhaps arrive at a similar, yet broader, conclusion, through different means. When discussing the British position in the Chagos Islands case, Prof. Wheatley points out that the UK’s B-Series position rests in the conviction that the International Court of Justice “should decide the case in the same way it would have done in the late 1960s, a time when the legal status of the self-determination norm divided states”. For him, this is incorrect due to the inherent limitations with B-Series thinking. International law is not a “brute fact” static in...