State Succession: Codification Tested Against the Facts / La succession d'Etats: la codification à l'épreuve des faits

by Martti Koskenniemi (Editor)

The Hague Academy Centre for Studies and Research in International Law and International Relations devoted its Session of 1996 to the Succession of States, including for the second time this topic in its programme, but in a context very different from that in which the 1962 Session had been held.Following the great wave of decolonizations, the studies conducted in the Centre in 1962 had constituted a kind of prologue to the lengthy deliberations by the International Law Commission that led to the 1978 Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties and the 1983 Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts. The less than enthusiastic reception that these Conventions had received from the international community seemed to condemn them into oblivion.The extraordinary political developments in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, however, suddenly focused interest in these questions anew. As the theme of the Session indicates, it became possible to examine the question of `codification tested against these facts'.Twenty-four participants from a French and an English section conducted this task with passion and talent. The present volume reproduces some of the best reports in an updated and technically harmonized form.Originally published as Colloques / Workshops - Law Books of the Academy , Volume 20.

1058 pages, Hardcover

First published May 19, 2000

About the author

Martti Koskenniemi was the Academy Professor and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He held visiting professorships at New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Utrecht, Columbia University, the University of São Paulo, the University of Toronto, and the universities of Paris I, II, X and XVI. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service from 1978 to 1994 and of the International Law Commission (UN) from 2002 to 2006. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001), The Politics of International Law (2011), The Cambridge Companion to International Law (2012, co-edited with Professor James Crawford), and To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870 (2021). He is a graduate of the universities of Turku and Oxford, and holds the degree of doctorate of laws honoris causa from the universities of Uppsala and Frankfurt.