International Law Quotes

“It is bureaucracy and habit that carries the soul of international law; lawyers merely systematize it.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The free rider problem is one reason why international standards have an inherent tendency to be rather lax. If standards are too strict, some States may not sign up to them at all. It is better to have standards that are loose enough for all the important participants in the activity to accept, so that all of the key States are at least bound by some standards, than to have stricter standards and find that some States refuse to accept them.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There are some matters on which all, or practically all, States genuinely take the same position. The idea that torture is unacceptable is an example. There may be differences as to what actually amounts to torture: the debates over water-boarding were the product of such differences. There may even be a mental reservation that would reluctantly regard torture as permissible as a last resort in an extreme situation such as the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario; and the list of States Parties to the UN Convention Against Torture certainly includes a number which are reputed to resort to torture. But no State will actually speak out in favour of maintaining a legal right for States routinely to engage in torture.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“International life is carried on between the extremes of isolationism and internationalism. We try to help our fellow human beings in some ways, at some times, and in some places; but we do not actually take overall responsibility for their welfare.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Law works best where it expresses aims and values that are already firmly and generally held throughout society—where its role is to formalize and order people’s behaviour, rather than to change it. The point is obvious, and no reason for disappointment. Little of the pain and misery in the world is the intended result of deliberate policies. Most results from lack of will, resources, or foresight.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“It is arguably the control of legislatures and taxation that makes national governments pre-eminent among the social institutions whose actions mould the character of everyday life. By stipulating in laws what must and what must not be done, and by exercising its control over the resources necessary to do those things, the national government—and with it, the nation-State—retains its primary importance.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The Security Council lies at the centre of the UN architecture. It consists of representatives of fifteen States: the five permanent members (the ‘P5’), China, France, Russia, the UK, and the USA, and ten others elected for two-year terms by the UN General Assembly having regard to the contributions made by each State to the maintenance of international peace and security, and to the principle of the equitable geographical distribution of Security Council members.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“No legal system obliges people to sit passively and accept an unlawful attack upon themselves: there is always a right to take action in self-defence.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There are many generally accepted limitations on the weapons and tactics that may be used in wartime. Many of them are set out in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the two Additional Protocols of 1977 which deal respectively with international armed conflicts and with non-international (internal) armed conflicts. (A third protocol, adopted in 2005, adopted the ‘red crystal’ as an international symbol to indicate protected persons and objects, alongside the red cross and red crescent symbols.) The Geneva Conventions also prescribe rules on matters such as the treatment of prisoners of war, and on the rights and duties of States that are in occupation of foreign territory. The latter rules, along with rules from the 1907 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, are applicable to the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the West Bank and Gaza, for example.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“One of the clearest principles of contemporary international law is that States are not free to threaten or use military force against each other or to intervene in each other’s affairs. That is one reason why, for example, western States have been ready to take action against terrorist groups in Iraq, where the States act at the invitation of the Iraqi government, but have been very reluctant to take such action in Syria, where there is no such invitation.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There are two things that people tend to expect from the law: that it keeps other people off their backs and leaves them free to organize their lives as they choose, and that it climbs onto other peoples backs so as to oblige them to do things for the common good.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“It is not intended that every violation of the law should be prosecuted. There are more important priorities on which to spend public money. It is enough that the law is available to be used when necessary, to try to prevent violations from reaching unacceptable levels in particular communities, and to prevent perpetrators of high-profile offences from escaping with impunity. Indeed, even when criminal charges are brought, it is increasingly common to prescribe some remedial sentence, such as attendance at a ‘speeding awareness’ course, instead of a penalty.

International law is no different. There is neither the expectation nor the intention that international law should be enforced on every occasion when it is violated. Many minor violations are willingly tolerated as the products of human frailty, or as not worth pursuing.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The invasion of Iraq by the UK and the USA in 2003 was widely regarded as incompatible with international law; but there is little doubt that many in the governments of those two States were (or allowed themselves to become) convinced that a legal justification for the invasion could be made out.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Sight must not be lost of the fact that international conferences and international organizations are, at heart, no more than gatherings of national governmental officials and their agents and employees.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Strictly speaking, resolutions of the UN and other international organizations cannot make international law. It is wrong, however, to regard them as having no legal significance whatever.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“A treaty is simply an agreement between States that is legally binding.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Hypocrisy tends to have a bad reputation: but it has a vital role in maintaining moral standards.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Systems of customary law, including customary international law, are rooted in the regularity of an identified practice.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Habit, torpor, and the pervasive desire of employees not to risk their careers and pensions by making the wrong decision: these are the main ingredients in the mixture that gives international law its great binding strength.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Recognition remains a high political act; and one State may refuse to recognize another purely as a matter of political discretion.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The establishment by the UN in 1975 of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People clearly affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination; and the requirements of a permanent population, a territory with reasonably clearly defined borders, an effective government, and independence from other States are at least arguably as well met as they were in the case of some other entities when they were admitted to the UN as States.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The principle of self-determination attaches to a ‘people’. Shared and distinct ethnicity, language, culture, and history are the kinds of characteristics that identify a ‘people’.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Lands originally came under the rule of a particular sovereign by conquest; and conquest was recognized until the first part of the 20th century as a lawful means of acquiring territory. Nowadays title to territory can change only by peaceful means, such as the cession of the territory by treaty, or the long and unchallenged occupation of territory that can give rise to a title based upon prescription.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Every State is free to make treaties with other States, and no treaty is binding upon a State unless it has agreed to become a party to it.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The idea of the sovereign State is one of the mythical principles that have underpinned political life for the past two or three centuries, since the decline of the ordering of political relations upon the basis of empires, religious or secular.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Sovereignty means that all States are equal: each has the right not to be dictated to by the others.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The function of international law, at the most basic level, is to secure the coexistence of sovereign States.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The existence of what some think of as the personal wealth, possessions, and entitlements of an individual is in truth possible only by virtue of the collaboration of all the other individuals who make up that society.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Our civilization is held together by a fragile web of interdependence.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“(1) military necessity (which permits the use of only that degree and kind of force, not otherwise prohibited by the law of armed conflict, that is required to achieve the legitimate military purpose of the conflict); (2) distinction (which requires discrimination between the armed forces and military targets and, on the other hand, non-combatants, civilians, and civilian targets); (3) proportionality (which requires that losses resulting from a military action should not be excessive in relation to the military advantage expected to be gained from the action); and, above all, (4) humanity (which forbids the infliction of suffering, injury, or destruction not necessary for the accomplishment of legitimate military purposes). The implications of these principles, and of more detailed prohibitions on weapons and tactics, are spelled out in military manuals issued by many States, such as The Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict issued by the UK Ministry of Defence in 2004. Serious violations of the laws of war, such as the deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants or the wanton destruction of towns and villages, amount to war crimes, for which the perpetrators may be punished by national courts, or by an international criminal tribunal that has jurisdiction over the events in question. Such international tribunals have been established on an ad hoc basis following the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, and (in slightly different hybrid forms, as ‘internationalized criminal courts’—national courts with some international judges) for Cambodia, East Timor, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. There is also the permanent International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) established in 2002 under the 1998 treaty known as the Rome Statute. By the end of 2013 the ICC had exercised its jurisdiction in relation to seven conflicts, all of them in Africa, and was investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in other situations.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction