Is the Law of Responsibility of States for Injuries to Aliens a Part of Universal International Law?

1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 863-891 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. N. Guha Roy

That a wrong done to an individual must be redressed by the offender himself or by someone else against whom the sanction of the community may be directed is one of those timeless axioms of justice without which social life is unthinkable. The most primitive form of redress which insisted on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was not really reparation at all, but retaliation pure and simple, treated as a substitute for reparation. Measures of individual retaliation are no longer permissible in municipal law and impartial tribunals are entrusted with the duty of determining the nature and the extent of the reparation for a given wrong according to the law of the land. International law has tried to follow parallel lines of development in this respect but has failed to keep pace with municipal law, largely because of its inherent difficulties. Reprisals, which are no better than individual retaliation, continued till even the other day to be acknowledged as a legitimate mode of reparation. The Covenant of the League of Nations, while imposing restrictions on resort to war, left uncertain the right of nations to make use of force short of war, suggesting thereby that the legality of reprisals might remain untouched. The Charter of the United Nations forbids the use of force except in certain contingencies and the implication of the relevant provision may well be that reprisals are still legal as long as they do not involve the use of force.

This Oxford Handbook is a comprehensive and authoritative study of the modern law on the use of force. Over 50 experts in the field offer a detailed analysis, and to an extent a restatement, of the law in this area. The Handbook reviews the status of the law on the use of force and assesses what changes, if any, have occurred as a result of recent developments. It offers cutting-edge and up-to-date scholarship on all major aspects of the prohibition of the use of force. Part I reviews the history of the subject and its recent challenges, and addresses the major conceptual approaches. Part II covers collective security, in particular the law and practice of the UN organs, and of regional organizations and arrangements. Part III considers the substance of the prohibition of the use of force and the right to self-defence and associated doctrines. Part IV is devoted to armed action undertaken on behalf of peoples and populations, including self-determination conflicts, resistance to armed occupation, and forcible humanitarian and pro-democratic action. The possibility of the revival of classical, expansive justifications for the use of force is addressed in Part V, followed by Part VI which considers new security challenges and the emerging law in relation to them. Part VII ties the key arguments developed in the book into a substantive conclusion. The Handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of international law and the use of force, and legal advisers to both governments and NGOs.


2019 ◽  
pp. 377-406
Author(s):  
Gleider Hernández

This chapter assesses the law of armed conflict. The right to resort to armed force, known as ‘jus ad bellum’, is a body of law that addresses the permissibility of entering into war in the first place. Despite the restrictions imposed by this body of law, it is clear that international law does not fully forbid the use of force, and instances of armed disputes between and within States continue to exist. Consequently, a second, older body of law exists called ‘jus in bello’, or the law of armed conflict, which has sought to restrain, or at least to regulate, the actual conduct of hostilities. The basic imperative of this body of law has been to restrict warfare in order to account for humanitarian principles by prohibiting certain types of weapons, or protecting certain categories of persons, such as wounded combatants, prisoners of war, or the civilian population.


2013 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabor Rona ◽  
Raha Wala

Just as a newspaper must separate its reporting from its editorials, legal scholarship must distinguish between representations of what the law is and what the author might like it to be. Daniel Bethlehem’s proposed principles and his arguments in support of them are an amalgam of the two that, if actualized under international law, would reverse more than a century of humanitarian and human rights progress: they would undermine the general prohibition against the use of force in international relations as well as the right to life and the scope of a state’s obligation of due process in the deprivation of life.


Author(s):  
Carla Ferstman

This chapter considers the consequences of breaches of human rights and international humanitarian law for the responsible international organizations. It concentrates on the obligations owed to injured individuals. The obligation to make reparation arises automatically from a finding of responsibility and is an obligation of result. I analyse who has this obligation, to whom it is owed, and what it entails. I also consider the right of individuals to procedures by which they may vindicate their right to a remedy and the right of access to a court that may be implied from certain human rights treaties. In tandem, I consider the relationship between those obligations and individuals’ rights under international law. An overarching issue is how the law of responsibility intersects with the specialized regimes of human rights and international humanitarian law and particularly, their application to individuals.


Author(s):  
Enzo Cannizzaro

The chapter discusses the philosophical foundations of the current regulation of the use of force. The chapter argues that, in correspondence with the emergence of a sphere of substantive rules protecting common interests of humankind, international law is also gradually developing a system of protection against egregious breaches of these interests. This conclusion is reached through an analysis of the law and practice governing the action of the UN Security Council as well as the law of state responsibility concerning individual and collective reactions to serious breaches of common interests. This system is based on positive obligations imposed upon individual states as well as UN organs, and it appears to be still rudimentary and inefficient. However, the chapter suggests that the mere existence of this system, these shortcomings notwithstanding, has the effect of promoting the further development of the law in search for more appropriate mechanisms of protection.


Author(s):  
Philippa Webb

The last 50 years have seen significant changes in the law of immunity. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has, over the past 15 years in particular, played an influential role in the law applicable to this ‘moving target’. This chapter examines three approaches of the ECtHR to the identification of general international law: (i) the ECtHR looking to the International Court of Justice; (ii) the ECtHR looking to national practice; and (iii) the ECtHR looking to the work of the International Law Commission and the provisional application of treaties. Although the ECtHR strives to locate itself within general international law, it necessarily approaches the immunities of States, officials, and international organizations through the lens of Article 6 ECHR and whether the immunity in question constitutes a legitimate and proportionate restriction on the right of access to court. This has, at times, taken the Court down a different path to other judicial bodies and we can identify the emergence of a ‘European approach’ to the role of immunity in employment disputes.


2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÖRG KAMMERHOFER

AbstractHans Kelsen is known both as a legal theorist and as an international lawyer. This article shows that his theory of international law is an integral part of the Kelsenian Pure Theory of Law. Two areas of international law are analysed: first, Kelsen's coercive order paradigm and its relationship to the bellum iustum doctrine; second, the Kelsenian notion of the unity of all law vis-à-vis theories of the relationship of international and municipal law. In a second step, the results of Kelsenian general legal theory of the late period – as interpreted and developed by the present author – are reapplied to selected doctrines of international law. Thus is the coercive order paradigm resolved, the unity of law dissolved, and the UN Charter reinterpreted to show that the concretization of norms as positive international law cannot be unmade by a scholarship usurping the right to make law.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-875 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROTEM GILADI

AbstractThe article explores the demise of the ‘colonial war’ category through the employment of French colonial troops, under the 1918 armistice, to occupy the German Rhineland.It traces the prevalence of – and the anxieties underpinning –antebellumdoctrine on using ‘Barbarous Forces’ in ‘European’ war. It then records the silence ofpostbellumscholars on the ‘horror on the Rhine’ – orchestrated allegations of rape framed in racialized terms of humanity and the requirements of the law of civilized warfare. Among possible explanations for this silence, the article follows recent literature that considers this scandal as the embodiment of crises in masculinity, white domination, and European civilization.These crises, like the scandal itself, expressedantebellumjurisprudential anxieties about the capacity – and implications – of black soldiers being ‘drilled white’. They also deprivedpostbellumlawyers of the vocabulary necessary to address what they signified: breakdown of the laws of war; evident, self-inflicted European barbarity; and the collapse of international law itself, embodied by the VersaillesDiktattreating Germany – as Smuts warned, ‘as we would not treat akaffirnation’ – as a colonial ‘object’, as Schmitt lamented.Last, the article traces the resurgence of ‘colonial war’. It reveals how, at the moment of collapse, in the very instrument embodying it, the category found a new life. Article 22(5) of the League of Nations Covenant (the Covenant) reasserted control over the colonial object, furnishing international lawyers with a new vocabulary to address the employment of colonial troops – yet, now, as part of the ‘law of peace’. Reclassified, both rule and category re-emerged, were codified, and institutionalized imperial governance.


Asian Survey ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stein Tønnesson

The article looks at three ways in which international law has affected government behavior in the South China Sea. It has exacerbated disputes. It has probably curtailed the use of force. And it has made it difficult to imagine solutions that violate the law of the sea.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-458
Author(s):  
Novia Puspa Ayu Larasati

the present time, the law is still considered discriminatory and not gender-just. Whereas the law should not regard gender to guarantee the fulfillment of women's rights. Women's rights are still not protected. Equality and elimination of discrimination against women are often the center of attention and a shared commitment to implement them. However, in social life, the achievement of equality of women's dignity still has not shown significant progress. So, if there is discrimination against women, it is a violation of women's rights. Women's rights violations occur because of many things, including the result of the legal system, where women become victims of the system. Many women's rights to work still have a lot of conflict about the role of women in the public sector. Today, discrimination against women is still very visible in the world of work. There are so many women who do not get the right to work. This research found that the structure of the company, rarely do we see women who get a place as a leader, in addition to the acceptance of female workers companies put many terms, such as looking attractive, not married, must stay in dormitory and so forth. Their salaries are sometimes different from male workers. Like male workers, women workers also have equal opportunities in the world of work. While there are many legislations governing the rights of women workers, it seems that many companies deliberately do not socialize it and even ignore the legislation just like that.


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