Abstract
There is uncertainty about the status of the individual in international law. The traditional positivist doctrine of international law is that States are the sole subjects of international law and that the individual is the object. The contemporary approach is that the individual is an original subject of international law and the owner of international individual rights. This approach relies for its justification on areas of international law such as investment protection treaties, intellectual property treaties, international human rights law, individual criminal liability in international law and Vienna Convention on Consular Relations where the individual has been brought into contact with international law.
 
 The objects of this article are: (i) to assess critically the various areas where the individual has been brought into contact with international law with a view to showing that the individual is not a full subject of international law; and (ii) to show that insofar as the individual possesses a limited locus standi in international law and a limited array of rights, that is, limited legal capacity, the proffered existence of an international legal personality of the individual is not only superfluous but also confuses international legal personality which involves the capacity to perform legal acts in the international sphere with legal personality in municipal law.
Highlights
The personification of the State took place in the mid-eighteenth century in the works of Emrich de Vattel and Christian Wolff (Note 1)
In spite of the longevity of the positivist theory of international law, its opponents argue that the theory is incongruous with the present state of affairs and that the individual is a subject of international law
The debate on the status of the individual in international law is a structural debate between the traditional positivist theorists who claim that States are solely and exclusively the subjects of international law and the individual is an object and the contemporary theorists who claim that the individual is a subject of international law in his own right but the debate is inextricably intertwined with the theory of international legal personality
Summary
The personification of the State took place in the mid-eighteenth century in the works of Emrich de Vattel and Christian Wolff (Note 1). The contemporary approach is that States are primarily but not exclusively the subjects of international law; that the individual directly possesses rights, powers and duties in international law; and that the individual may be regarded as a subject of international law and as possessing international personality (Parlett, 2011). It was in the early twentieth century that the protection of individual rights was introduced by the first two 1929 Geneva Conventions which were the first humanitarian law treaties that referred to rights for individuals. The positivist doctrine that the individual is only an ‘object’ of international law is critically assessed in a lexical order
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