Kollektive Nichtanerkennung illegaler Staaten. Grundlagen und Folgen einer international koordinierten Sanktion, dargestellt am Beispiel der Turkischen Republik Nord-Zypern [Collective Non-recognition of Illegal States. Legal Foundations and Consequences of an Internationally Co-ordinated Sanction With Particular Reference to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Abstract

1. The collective non-recognition of illegal States has been characterized as “an essential legal weapon in the fight against grave breaches of the basic rules of international law”.1 It is the noble and challenging task of Stefan Talmon's voluminous treatise to examine exhaustively the legal foundations and consequences of this “legal weapon”, and he fulfils this task in an impressive way. The book, which has been accepted by the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen as the author's habilitation, shows Talmon's meticulous working method and displays an amount of research that deserves deep respect. Methodologically, Talmon approaches the issue by way of an example, that is, by discussing a case study. He chooses the case of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC)—which is collectively not recognized due to the international recognition of the government of the Republic of Cyprus as the government of all Cyprus—in order to illustrate the numerous legal problems related to collective non-recognition. This allows for a comparison of the different practices of non-recognition of the UK, the United States and Germany, which, in turn, paves way for a discussion of which consequences of non-recognition are prompted by international law and which by national law.