The Violation of International Law and its Consequences

Abstract

The issue of State responsibility has received a great deal of attention from legal scholars since the beginning of the last century. Among the many contributions worth mentioning are the masterly works of Anzilotti, Kelsen and Ago. These scholarly efforts are all the more remarkable in the light of the fragmentary and unsettled practice concerning responsibility, which makes the development of a theory valid for all violations of international law extremely difficult. This explains why the International Law Commission, which started to address State responsibility for the treatment of aliens in 1956 and later broadened its research to cover all violations of international law, completed its work only in 2001, after almost fifty years. General international law imposes several restrictions on countermeasures. The first and oldest is that of proportionality between the violation suffered and the violation committed as a countermeasure.Keywords:International Court of Justice; international force; international law; legal scholars