Unilateral Declarations

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A Footnote on Secession

October 26, 2017

We have had a very rich debate on secession on the blog in recent weeks, and we will have more posts to follow. For my part, I would agree with much of what Jure Vidmar has said in his post this week, with the proviso that I personally don't think the argument out of comparative constitutionalism necessarily has much purchase - that argument is contextually specific, and what works constitutionally in Canada or in the UK need not be the position in Spain. The ultimate arbiter of the Spanish constitutional order - the Constitutional Tribunal - has (for good or ill) not gone the Quebec Reference path. I agree in particular that international law has little to say on the secession of Catalonia specifically; Kurdistan is a more difficult question (on which a bit more below). What I would like to do in this post, however, is take a step back and reflect more generally on how secession is regulated by international law - and it is indeed regulated, if not wholly so.

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Harmonizing Standards in Armed Conflict

September 8, 2014

Editor's Note: This post is part of the joint series of posts hosted by EJIL:Talk!, Lawfare and Intercross (blog of the International Committee of the Red Cross) and arising out of the Transatlantic Workshop on International Law and Armed Conflict held in…

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The Marshall Islands’ Case against India’s Nuclear Weapons Program at the ICJ

June 27, 2014

Shashank P. Kumar is a Dispute Settlement Lawyer at the Appellate Body Secretariat of the WTO in Geneva and a visiting lecturer of international law at National Law University, Jodhpur, India. Earlier this year, on 24 April, the Republic of the Marshall Islands filed an application against India and eight…

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Crimea: Does “The West“ Now Pay the Price for Kosovo?

April 22, 2014

There is a lingering sentiment on this blog (see the posts by Nico Krisch and Christian Marxsen) that “the Kosovo issue” has facilitated the blatant violations of international law recently committed by Russia with regard to Crimea (notably the unlawful annexation of that territory), and that “the West’s” behaviour in the Kosovo context now prevents clear…

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Crimea’s Referendum and Secession: Why it Resembles Northern Cyprus More than Kosovo

March 20, 2014

On 16 March 2014, Crimea held a referendum on its future legal status. Reportedly, the choice to join Russia was supported by an overwhelming 95.5 per cent of all votes cast, with the turnout of 83 per cent. A day earlier, Russia vetoed a draft Security Council resolution which sought to declare the referendum as…

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