Suchergebnisse

Jadhav Case (India v. Pakistan) concerned Pakistan's arrest, detention, conviction, and death sentence of Kulbhushan Sudhir Jadhav, asserted by India to be an Indian national, who had been convicted of engaging in acts of terrorism and espionage in Pakistan. This is the third dispute over the interpretation of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) to come before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In contrast to the Applicants in the previous consular rights cases, India sought relief that included the annulment of Jadhav's conviction in Pakistan, his release from custody, and his safe transfer to India. After unanimously finding it had jurisdiction, fifteen judges of the ICJ, with only Judge ad hoc Jillani dissenting, held on the merits that Pakistan had breached VCCR Article 36 by failing to inform Jadhav without delay of his rights under that provision; by failing to notify without delay the appropriate consular post of India in Pakistan of his detention; and by depriving India of its right to communicate with Jadhav, to visit him in detention, and arrange for his legal representation. In addition, the Court, with only Judge ad hoc Jillani dissenting, found that Pakistan is under an obligation to inform Jadhav of his rights without further delay and is obliged to provide Indian consular officers access to him. The Court further found that appropriate reparation required Pakistan to provide, by means of its own choosing, effective review and reconsideration of Jadhav's conviction and sentence to ensure that full weight is given to the effect of the violation of his rights. Finally, the ICJ, again with Judge ad hoc Jillani dissenting, declared that a continued stay of execution constituted an indispensable condition for the effective review and reconsideration of Jadhav's conviction and sentence.

On 25 March 2019, U.S. president Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognizing the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel. The Golan Heights proclamation, which endorses Israel's annexation of the territory captured from Syria in the 1967 war, was issued two weeks before the Israeli general election in a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. Undermining internationally agreed-upon norms prohibiting states from recognizing the annexation of territory by force, the proclamation could have detrimental consequences for the international legal order, providing a precedent for other states to take steps to annex territory they claim is necessary for their defense.

President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. embassy to the city has been universally condemned, as it is contrary to a well-established rule of international law stipulating that states must not recognize the fruits of conquest. While the United States chose to exercise its right of veto in the UN Security Council to block a resolution criticizing the presidential decision, the remaining members of the council, including close U.S. allies, criticized it. Similarly, the UN General Assembly, the European Union, the Arab League, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation have all passed strongly worded resolutions saying that they would not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including in and around Jerusalem. This paper examines the legal standing of the U.S. decision in light of previous positions that the United States has historically adopted or endorsed.

This article uses the history of partition to assess when self-determination became a rule of customary international law prohibiting partition as a method of decolonization. In so doing it revisits the partitions of Indochina, Korea, India, Palestine, Cyprus, South Africa, and South West Africa, and explains that UN practice underwent a transformation when the UN General Assembly opposed the United Kingdom's partition proposals for Cyprus in 1958. Two years later, the UN General Assembly condemned any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country in Resolution 1514 (1960).
The illegality of partition under customary international law was raised during the second phase of the South West Africa Cases (1960–1966) in respect of South Africa's homelands policy, but the International Court of Justice (ICJ) infamously did not address the merits of those cases. The illegality of partition was also raised in the arbitration between the United Kingdom and Mauritius over the establishment of the British Indian Ocean Territory in 1965. Like the ICJ in the South West Africa Cases, the Arbitral Tribunal decided that it did not have jurisdiction to address the legality of the British excision of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, even though the legality of the excision was argued at length between counsels for Mauritius and the United Kingdom in their oral pleadings and written statements.
However, in their joint dissenting opinion, Judge Rüdiger Wolfrum and Judge James Kateka expressed their opinion that self-determination had developed before 1965, and that consequently the partition was unlawful. This paper agrees that selfdetermination prohibited the partition of Mauritius to establish the British Indian Ocean Territory, a new colony, in 1965 although self-determination probably did not emerge as a rule of customary international law until the adoption of the human rights covenants in 1966, after the excision of the Chagos Archipelago in 1965, but before the passage of the Mauritius Independence Act in 1968.