International Law And The Right Of Self-Determination

9 Pages 2278 Words

attributes of a state as defined in international law (Parker). Since 1945, the UN has broadened the scope of self-determination with the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960 and the two Human Rights Covenants in 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Malanczuk p 327). The Helsinki Final Act includes the notion of self-determination and it is also accepted as a right in the norms developed by regional organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The principle has subsequently evolved within international law as an inalienable right.
Self-determination is a term that has been widely interpreted in international law. There are numerous and conflicting interpretations of self-determination that may have considerable practical implications. Considerable confusion still exists about the legal principle of self-determination. This confusion is due partly to the failure to understand the context in which the concept began. State practice during the time of decolonization affirmed the rights of people to self-determination. This led to the misunderstanding that the principle was intended to be applied universally and without objection. When many non-colonial states tried to invoke the right and failed, the international community was accused of holding double standards. When the international community did affirm the rights of peoples to self-determination, they didn’t intend for it to be applied universally. Their reasoning was that people in independent states had already exercised their right to self-determination and they were only intending to extend that right to people who had not yet exercised it, specifically, colonized nations. The ICJ’s role in interpreting the laws of self-determination as they apply to each individual situation is necessa...