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, transnational corporations, etc., presently participate in international law, as do indigenous peoples and minority groups. This flexibility is reflected only to a limited extent in current articulations of sources of international law.6 The entities do not all participate in the same way: State rights are not the same as for 1 After N. Bobbio, The Age of Rights (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996). Article 4.1 of the UN Charter. 3 In a vast literature, one of the best general accounts remains that by A. Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge
discussed in Chapter 2 , early Western humanitarian organizations were usually known as committees or societies and later the term “voluntary agencies” (VOLAG) was adopted. The term NGO can be traced back at least as far as Chapter X, Article 71 of the UN Charter of 1945, which specifically mentions NGOs in making consultative arrangements for areas in which they have expertise, and
ones. The first question concerns the legality–legitimacy spectrum. Is legality through UN authorization indispensable? Is non-authorized intervention by definition illegal or is it perhaps legal given an alternative reading of the UN Charter? 37 Can intervention be condoned if it appears legitimate even though it is technically illegal, as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo concluded in its detailed report? 38 Another tack is the
humanitarian purposes in certain exceptional cases, thereby bypassing the cardinal norm of non-intervention (see table 4.1 ). According to Wilhelm Grewe’s assessment, in the nineteenth century ‘the principle of humanitarian intervention increasingly absorbed all other grounds of intervention (with the exception of contractual permission and self-help)’. 12 This tendency in law and practice is striking, for, prior to the UN Charter and the international law of
indeterminacies towards affirmative critique.46 The author was spurred to reflection on indigenous issues through attendance at highly charged sessions of the WGIP in the 1990s. The discussions spanned an enormous range of questions, from the fundamental nature of international law, the history of international law, the meaning of the UN Charter, the politics of definition, through details of human rights, selfdetermination, environmental and resource rights, health issues, international economic law, etc. Debates raged through all the nuances of the draft Declaration – structure
-racist activists wanted a legally binding Bill of Rights. The UDHR, however, only elaborated in more detail the principles outlined in the UN Charter. It did not make them legally binding. One of the reasons why the outcome was a declaration rather than a treaty was the concern on the part of many nation-states that a treaty would lead to intervention into their own domestic affairs. This is relatively easy to understand in the case of the White Western states that had explicitly racist policies. These White countries also, however, sought to convince countries such as India
. Homan, ‘Multinational peace support operations: problems and prospects’, in O. Ribbelink (ed.), Beyond the UN Charter: Peace, Security and the Role of Justice (The Hague: Hague Academic Press, 2008), 114. 29 Homan, ‘Multinational peace support’, 115; and T. S. Tresch, ‘Cultural and political challenges in military missions: how officers view multiculturalism in armed forces’, in G. Caforio (ed.), Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development [Advances in Military Sociology: Essays in Honor of Charles C. Moskos, vol. 12:1] (Bingley: Emerald
of Racial Discrimination’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 15:4 (1966), 1057. 5 Thomas Buergenthal, ‘The UN Human Rights Committee’, Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, 5 (2001), 341. 1 2 2 Introduction had maintained for two decades that machinery of this kind infringed national sovereignty and was contrary to the UN Charter.6 Banton notes that it was important to call the monitoring body a ‘committee’, which made it sound ‘less novel and less threatening’,7 nomenclature adopted by all subsequent UN treaty-monitoring bodies. As observed
transforming the implementation of rights into culturally specific local contexts: if human rights represent a universal project, they are also in the ownership of indigenous peoples. The role of the peoples is expressed widely enough to include the principle of States paying attention to indigenous readings of particular rights. As elsewhere, the force of Article 1 is diluted by difficult syntax: it is ‘indigenous peoples’ who are recognised by Article 1 as holding rights under the UN Charter, the UDHR, and international human rights law. But while peoples rights loom large
intervention, including Chapter VII of the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention of 1948. Evans and Newnham argue that while “there is no legal right of humanitarian intervention comparable to the traditional rights of states, there is growing international consensus that the Westphalian system is too restrictive” (1998, p. 232) and thus intervention can be permissible. This liberal