James Crawford

The law of international responsibility

The law of international responsibility plays a fundamental role in the modern system of international law, surpassed by none and paralleled only by the law of treaties. The volume seeks to cover the entirety of the field of international responsibility, with a particular focus on the work of the International Law Commission. It provides detailed discussion and analysis of the historically predominant topics of State responsibility, on which the ILC completed its work in 2001, and the specific sub-topic of diplomatic protection, work on which was completed by the ILC in 2006. However, it also covers both the topic of responsibility of international organizations, on which the ILCs work is ongoing (a set of draft Articles having been adopted on first reading in 2009), and that of liability for harmful activities not prohibited under international law on which the ILC adopted drafts in 2001 and 2006.

THE ILC'S ARTICLES ON RESPONSIBILITY OF STATES FOR INTERNATIONALLY WRONGFUL ACTS: A RETROSPECT

The development of the articles on state responsibility of the International Law Commission (ILC) has been described elsewhere, in particular in the ILC’s Yearbook. The phases of development of the first (1955-1996) andsecond (1998-2001) readings are well enough known, and there is little point in repeating this material. Whatever the trials and longueurs of their production, the articles with their commentaries now exist and may be assessed as a whole. The first reading was the product of decades of work under successive special rapporteurs (Roberto Ago, Willem Riphagen, and Gaetano Arangio-Ruiz). The second readingwas equally a collective process and many members contributed to the final result. As I was formally responsible for shaping the work on second reading, I may not be the best person to comment on the outcome. Anything less than a full-scale defense of the text will be seen as an unauthorized retreat, and if the text cannot defend itself with the aid of the commentaries, it is too late for individuals to make up for any deficiencies.

Lawfare and warfare

Modern law and modern war: Warfare has always been a central preoccupation and presented a kind of ultimate test for international law. It is hard to think of international law governing the relations amongst states without having something to say about war – when war is and is not an appropriate exercise of sovereign authority, how war can and cannot be conducted, which of war’s outcomes will and will not become components of a post-war status quo, and so on. It is conventional to imagine that international law restrains war by making distinctions: this is war, and this is not; this is sovereignty, and this is not; this is legal warfare, and this is not. The terms with which these legal distinctions are drawn change over time. The vernacular may be more or less sodden with ethical considerations, more or less rooted in the specific treaty arrangements entered into by states. The distinctions may be drawn more or less sharply, may be matters of kind or degree. What goes on one or the other side of these distinctions may change, but the idea that law is about distinguishing war from peace, sovereign right from sovereign whim, legal from illegal conduct, on the battlefield and off, endures. Discussions about international law and war usually unfold as if the participants were imagining an international law which would be able to substitute itself for sovereign power in a top-down fashion, first to distinguish legal from illegal violence and then, perhaps not today but eventually, or perhaps not directly but indirectly, to bring that distinction to bear in the life of sovereigns, extinguishing sovereign authority for war at the point it crosses a legal limit. The idea is that the articulation of right will discipline, limit and restrain sovereign power when it turns to violence. International law proposes to bring this about through a series of doctrines, definitions and arguments which say where war begins and ends, and then through an apparatus of institutions and relationships which are linked in one or another way to these doctrines and which are the locus for or the effect of these sayings.