Kimberley N. Trapp, State Responsibility for International Terrorism.Problems and Prospects

Abstract

Ten years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the priorities of world politics now appear to shift to different topics and themes. Accordingly, it is time for international lawyers to identify whether the international fight against terrorism has an enduring legacy. The monograph by Kimberley Trapp will be of particular help for this endeavour with respect to the allocation of state responsibility for international terrorism. In this book, terrorism is not presented as a �new challenge� which reveals the inadequacy of existing rules. Instead, Trapp explores the potential of the existing legal rules to hold states responsible for their implication in the commission of terrorist attacks. Her main prism of analysis is the law of state responsibility; not so much in the sense that she would go through the work of the ILC and see how terrorism-related violations of international law could be addressed by the ILC Articles on State Responsibility. Rather, Trapp uses the framework of the law of state responsibility in a constructive and practice-oriented manner to establish how states can effectively be held responsible for their implication in terrorist activities. She follows a pragmatic approach which gets lost neither in discussions about the definition of terrorism nor in the ideological cleavages about the possibility of �state terrorism�. Her definition of terrorism is drawn from existing, as she calls them, �terrorism suppression conventions� (�TSCs�) and supplemented by elements of the practice of both the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly (at 14�23). With respect to �state terrorism� Trapp pragmatically holds that this notion could fulfil a useful role as it highlights �the possibility of state sponsorship and support for acts� that fall within the overall regime of international law concerning terrorism (at 24).