Source: https://b-ok.org/book/924559/beb368
Timestamp: 2019-02-22 11:38:05
Document Index: 718386615

Matched Legal Cases: ['Art. 24', 'EWCA ', 'UKHL ', 'Art. 39', 'Art. 41', 'art 2']

The Legal Status of Territories Subject to Administration by International Organisations | Bernhard Knoll | download
Main The Legal Status of Territories Subject to Administration by International Organisations
The international community's practice of administering territories in post-conflict environments has raised important legal questions. Using Kosovo as a case study, Bernhard Knoll analyses the identity of the administrating UN organ, the ways in which the territories under consideration have acquired partial subjectivity in international law and the nature of legal obligations in the fiduciary exercise of transitional administration developed within the League of Nations' Mandate and the UN Trusteeship systems. Knoll discusses Kosovo's internal political and constitutional order and notes the absence of some of the characteristics normally found in liberal democracies, before proposing that the UN consolidates accountability guidelines related to the protection of human rights and the development of democratic standards should it engage in the transitional administration of territory.
ISBN 10: 0521885833
ISBN 13: 9780511410031
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Einfuhrung in die Soziologie 2: Die Individuen in ihrer Gesellschaft, 4. Auflage
THE LEGAL STATUS OF TERRITORIES
SUBJECT TO ADMINISTRATION BY
The international community’s practice of administering territories in
post-conflict environments has raised important legal questions. Using
Namibia and Kosovo as case studies, Bernhard Knoll analyses the identity of the administrating UN organ, the ways in which the territories
under consideration have acquired partial subjectivity in international
law and the nature of legal obligations in the fiduciary exercise of
transitional administration developed within the League of Nations’
Mandate and the UN Trusteeship systems. Knoll discusses Kosovo’s
internal political and constitutional order and notes the absence of
some of the characteristics normally found in liberal democracies, before
proposing that the UN consolidates accountability guidelines related to
the protection of human rights and the development of democratic
standards should it engage in the transitional administration of territory.
B E R N H A R D K N O L L is Special Adviser to the Director of the OSCE
TERRITORIES SUBJECT TO
A D M I N I S T RA T I O N B Y
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521885836
© Bernhard Knoll 2008
ISBN-13 978-0-511-40895-3
978-0-521-88583-6
Foreword: Pierre-Marie Dupuy
Table of Cases and Judicial Decisions
European Commission/Court of Human Rights
7.4 East Timor
7.6 Kosovo
7.7 Palestine
I.1 International administrations and the discourse of empire
I.2 Methodological frames and structure
Creation of internationalised territories
1.1 Horizontal transfer of effective control and the bare title to
1.1.1 Doctrine and jurisprudence
1.1.2 Dynamics of state practice
(i) Panama Canal and Guantánamo Bay (both 1903)
(ii) Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878) and the Saar Territory
(iii) Contrasting the nudum ius with state servitudes
1.1.3 Mixed methodology: Chapter VII and the incorporation of a
(i) Eastern Slavonia (1995)
1.2 UN territorial administration and the vertical imposition of
1.2.1 Searching for a legal basis: from Art. 24 to Chapter VII of the
(i) Jerusalem and Trieste (both 1947)
(ii) Western Irian (1962) and Namibia (1967)
1.2.2 Imposing the divorce: Chapter VII and the appropriation of
effective control by the UN
(i) Kosovo and East Timor (both 1999)
(ii) Disjunction between sovereign title and effective control in
state practice: selected examples since 1878
Résumé: towards an in rem characterisation of internationalised
Fiduciary administration: mandates, trust and the
transitory sovereignty vacuum
Introduction: the challenge to patrimonial conceptions of sovereignty
2.1 Mandates and the displacement of the sovereign
2.1.1 Translating political context into legal response
(i) Trust and the transposition of municipal legal
2.1.2 The Mandate system as a network of interlocking
(i) Formal categorisation of legal instruments utilised
(ii) Suprema potestas within the Mandate system?
(iii) Application of a ‘matrix of modernism’
2.2 ‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi!’: the Trusteeship system and the return
2.2.1 Self-determination and the reversion to the sovereignty
(i) ‘Silent alchemy’: Namibia and the triumph of the
2.2.2 Ever-closer supervision and obligations under the Trusteeship
(i) Normative framework of the Trusteeship mechanism
(ii) Institutional framework
(iii) Mandates and Trusteeship territories
2.2.3 South-West Africa revisited
(ii) Legal basis for terminating the Mandate
(iii) Virtual governance: the United Nations Council for
Résumé: heightened international authority and the ‘peoples’
as a new actor
Self-determination and the personality of
internationalised territories
Introduction: international law’s agnosticism
3.1 Subjectivity as entitlement
3.1.1 The dynamic principle of self-determination
(i) Norms of self-determination as a latent international
3.1.2 Other sources of entitlement: the inductive approach
(i) The Free City of Danzig, the Westbank/Gaza and
3.2 Agency and the construction of international legal personality
(i) Two points of clarification regarding agency ex lege
3.2.1 Representation-in-trust
3.2.2 Agency and ‘performativity’
Résumé: functional approaches to legal personality
‘The King’s two bodies’: the dual functions of
Introduction: the elusive ‘international community interest’
4.1 Of international agents and organs
4.1.1 A custodian’s parallel set of duties
4.2 Cases of dual functionality
4.2.1 The ‘dual mandate’
4.2.2 The Allied Control Authority and its bona fide representation
4.2.3 The United Nations Council for Namibia
(i) Normative content of the Council’s Decree No. 1 . . .
within the UN legal order
(ii) . . . within the domestic legal order of states
(iii) . . . within the Namibian legal order
Postscript: temporary identity of domestic and foreign policy
Extent of UN authority in Kosovo and the problem of an
open-ended institution-building mandate
Introduction: the UN imperium over the territory
5.1 Kosovo’s status and Serbia’s bare title to the territory
5.1.1 ‘Paramount law of the land’: Resolution 1244 and its first
(i) UNMIK’s deployment strategy and ‘pillar’ structure
(ii) Sovereignty v. imperium: applying the in rem
(iii) A case study
5.1.2 From benchmarking to status?
(i) Governance challenge wrapped in a sovereignty
(ii) Of roadmaps and roadblocks: the ‘earned sovereignty’
5.2 UNMIK as territorial agent and UN organ
5.2.1 Territorial agency
(i) UNTAET and the Timor Gap Treaty
(ii) UNMIK’s performance of agency
(iii) Towards a limited legal personality? A memo to the Kosovo
5.2.2 UNMIK as administrator of an international trust
(i) Privatisation, or: to be or not to be immune?
Postscript: view from international humanitarian law
The status process: Kosovo’s endgame
Introduction: UNMIK as facilitator?
6.1 Statehood or stasis? UNOSEK and the Contact Group
6.1.1 Miscalculations and flawed premises
(i) Spoiling the party
(ii) The Troika
6.1.2 UNOSEK’s settlement proposal
(i) The question of international powers
(ii) Building legitimacy: a new constitution
6.2 Wider implications for public international law
6.2.1 The option of ‘status imposition’
6.2.2 The future of self-determination claims
6.2.3 Challenges to Serbia’s position
Résumé: status resolution as contrapunctus
An anomalous legitimacy cycle
Introduction: premises and challenges
7.1 A transitional administration in transition
7.1.1 Two dimensions of the legitimacy discourse
7.2 Pursuit of domestic legitimacy: two promises
7.2.1 Foundational promise
(i) The Border Agreement between FRY and
(ii) Vouching for the ward: the Haradinaj case
7.2.2 Devolution of power and the democratic moment
7.3 Legitimacy through defiance
7.3.1 SRSG v. the Kosovo Assembly
7.3.2 ‘You’re fired’: OHR v. The Bosnian Constitutional
7.3.3 Two fronts of the struggle over domestic legitimacy
Résumé: negative externalities
Properties of a transitory legal order
Introduction: the transitionality frame
8.1 Unmediated import of international law
8.1.1 Policing the border between past and future government
8.1.2 Collapse of dualism and the promise of a liberal future
8.2 Absence of hierarchy of local norms
8.2.1 Uniform promulgation
8.2.2 The problem of review
(i) Palestine: competence to review an Ordinance
(ii) Bosnia: incidental norm control
8.2.3 ‘Sed quis custodiet?’: norm control and legality
8.3 A human rights vacuum?
8.3.1 Rights without remedies
(i) Extraterritorial applicability of human rights
(ii) The Shell Game: the Court’s failure to close the gap in
Behrami and Saramati
8.3.2 Too little, too late: Kosovo’s Human Rights Advisory Panel
(ii) The long march of UNMIK Regulation 2006/12
8.3.3 Will the International Civilian Representative in Kosovo do
(i) A new Mandate
Résumé: the ‘stickiness’ of an interim legal order
As to the legal status of the administering organ
As to the nature of powers assumed by an international
(iii) As to their extent
As to their limitation by international human rights law
As to the fiduciary bond established between the international
community and the population under its tutelage
As to the title to territory
(vii) As to the legal status of the territory
(viii) Five themes for Accountability Guidelines for plenary UN
Administration Missions
A Treaties, conventions and constitutions (of international
B UN sources
C Documents and reports of international organisations
UN: peacekeeping/peace-building, governance
D UNMIK and UNTAET legal sources (‘mediate UN law’)
E Agreements between international/local institutions and third
F Pronouncements of local Kosovo institutions
G Contact Group statements and unpublished documents (letters,
Code Cables, etc.)
B Book chapters
D Speeches, theses, working papers and think tank/NGO
4.1 Position of an international territorial administration
5.1 UNMIK’s consultative structure within the IAC, 2000
6.1 The Contact Group in the status process,
7.1 Dual-key governance framework
This book undertakes an inquiry into the set of questions about the
location of political processes of ‘internationalisation’ of territory in key
concepts of public international law, such as mandates, trusteeship,
wardship, servitude, agency and military occupation. At the same
time, Bernhard Knoll’s stimulating analysis represents a highly valuable
contribution to the functional approach to the international administration of a territory under the auspices and control of the United
Nations. Especially in the still evolutionary case of Kosovo, the reconciliation of the objectives of a UN territorial governance mission, mandated by
the international community, as well as of the right to self-determination of
people, seen by the majority of international lawyers as being a peremptory
norm of ius cogens, with the requirement of respecting the territorial
integrity of an ‘old sovereign’, remains an issue with which international
lawyers will continue to struggle.
From a more theoretical perspective, the study inquires how an
international authority manages the legal process through which it
temporarily divorces the conceptual hallmarks of dominium and imperium and, in a second step, how it fills the vacuum as provider of ersatz
good governance. Bernhard Knoll demonstrates that in its quality as a
situated territorial agent, an international mission is constrained by the
operation of a fiduciary bond between itself and the governed population. In its identity as subsidiary organ of the United Nations, a UN
governance mission is conditioned in its ‘domestic’ strategic choices by
both international law and by the politics of its mother organisation.
Discussing the internal political and legal order of an internationalised
territory, Knoll further notes that the rule of an international administration is subject to an ‘anomalous’ legitimacy cycle. The fundamental
indeterminacy of law, and gaps in statutory instruments and in
human rights protection further expose the frailty of transitional
The research presented in this book strikes at the heart of the current
debate over the powers which the United Nations exercises both within
an internationalised territory and from outside, as its supreme organ,
the Security Council, is increasingly called upon to balance the weight of
the sovereign’s inviolable and static borders against indigenous bids at
determining the dynamic ‘self’ in a people. It thus focuses on the
Security Council’s novel approach to utilise Chapter VII powers to
endow a UN subsidiary organ with capacities regularly identified with
those possessed by a ‘sovereign’. Second, particular emphasis is placed
on the novelty of vesting a territory under UN administration with a
partial personality. While the study notes that forms of international
personality have displayed great variety in the past, the author presents
empirical proof of the representation of non-state territorial entities in
international law, focusing on the practice of UN governance missions
Yet this book is not merely a study of the legal identity of territories
under transitional international administration. It is also a fascinating
contribution to the study of the evolution of one of the key concepts that
underlie the core of the international legal system as well as constitutional law and political theory, namely, the concept of sovereignty.
Starting from apparently marginal and exceptional cases in which territories are not administrated by one single State, it reviews key notions
belonging to the general theory of sovereignty, starting with the legal
title on which it is grounded and continuing with the issues of legal
status and régime.
Knoll does not proceed in a static way; his study accounts for the
stream of history and its evolution throughout the Mandate and
Trusteeship systems which heralded a significant change in normative
spheres. Indeed, the author produced an exceptional account of the
history of the subject of trusteeship. Thanks to the modern experiences
of international transitory administration outlined in this study, the
international community is deemed to possess the capacities to perform
the obligations towards itself and the people under its administration.
Compliance with these obligations is, as this study demonstrates in its
later part, imperfect and defective. The basic dilemma of international
institution-building consists in the intention to establish a framework of
liberal constitutional law which does not, itself, fully submit to liberal
constitutional principles. International organisations, so it seems, take
exception to their commitment to human rights, equal political participation and the rule of law when they administer territory which, in
turn, raises the question whether they should be in the business of
promoting normative change through techniques of norm-building.
This book is intellectually very ambitious. It deals with a subject with
has as much practical relevance as it has theoretical interest. Its approach
to methodological issues is searching and careful. Its approach to other
disciplines – its ‘interdisciplinarity’ – is thoughtful and measured. In
Bernhard Knoll’s work, international law, political science and history
intersect. The author, however, never becomes a ‘mere’ historian or
political scientist – his legal–intellectual persona always remains in
the forefront. The book is written elegantly and with remarkable passion. It is apparent that Knoll benefits from his personal knowledge of
the Kosovo dilemma which permits him to expand upon subjects unfamiliar to outsiders. The reader will, in any case, not be in any doubt that
the writer is anything but intimately engaged with what is a very difficult
subject-matter, and he conveys the full complexity of the issues involved
to the reader without pretending that there are any easy answers.
Chair of Public International Law,
European University Institute and Université de
Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
On s’aperçoit qu’on est devenu un spécialiste
quand les choses dont on parle avec plaisir
ennuient les autres.
In the course of a research journey that spans years, there are times when
a student, by pure chance, stumbles over diamonds – gems cut out of the
sheer brilliance of the intellect, which glow, sparkle and affect the course
of one’s expedition. For each and every chapter of this book, I was lucky
to find diamonds whose spark enlightened the path ahead. Three of
those I shall mention. Nathaniel Berman’s remarkable article on
‘Sovereignty in Abeyance’ (published in 1988/89) was crucial in formulating the thesis of chapter 2. The writing of Antony Anghie, recently
fused into a book-length account of the ‘science’ of colonial and
Mandate administration and its legacies (2005), proved equally inspiring. Another key text, authored by Alfred Verdroß et al. in 1980,
encouraged my attempt to apply the ‘divorce’ between sovereign title
and effective control to the case of Kosovo.
Just as pieces of academic research, one also discovers people; conversations can be as inspiring as gazing into the heart of a jewel. I have
incurred many debts in writing this book and, most of all, I am grateful
to the supervisor of my doctoral thesis at the European University
Institute in Florence, Professor Pierre-Marie Dupuy, for providing
direction and perspective. I hold him accountable for eventually convincing me to expand what was planned to be a Master’s thesis into a
dissertation. He has done so with an astonishing sense of humour that
managed to keep my enthusiasm in check. I would like to extend special
thanks to the Institute for Legal Studies of Madison Law School, and in
particular Professor Heinz Klug, for support during the extremely productive winter semester 2004/2005 as visiting scholar at the University of
Gilbert Cesbron, Ce siècle appelle au secours (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), at 95.
Wisconsin. Third, I am grateful to my defence board for reviewing this
work and providing critical comments: Professors Neil Walker,
Hanspeter Neuhold and Christian Tomuschat.
As Gred Grandin observed in the preface to his study of Mayan
cultural and national identity in Guatemala, acknowledgements perform an essential Marxist task: they situate the production of individual
work in a long chain of influence and encouragement.2 In this vein, I am
most indebted to Elisabeth and Reinhold, my parents, and my sister
Barbara, who shone from afar, and were ever so close, particularly in the
challenging first year of my work in Florence.
In Kosovo, I thank many colleagues and friends both within and
outside the international mission for their encouragement, inspiration
and the valuable documentary material. Among them were Franklin de
Vrieze, still with the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, Carsten Weber, now with
MONUC, Verena Ringler and Severin Strohal of the ICO/EUSR
Preparation Team in Prishtina, Izabella and Tim Cooper at UNMIK
and UNDP Kosovo, respectively, Dardan Gashi at the Kosovo Ministry
of Local Governance, and Judith Safar, formerly with the UNMIK Pillar
IV’s Legal Department. Without the rigorous guidance of OSCE
Ambassadors Daan Everts and Pascal Fiesci and their respective Chefs
de Cabinet, Andrew Joscelyne and Mark Etherington, I would not have
received the professional insights that enabled me to probe deeper into
the tensions underlying an international institution-building mandate.
Within Kosovo’s closer periphery, I am indebted to Kristof Bender of
the European Stability Initiative, Dr Friedhelm Frischenschlager, Elmars
Svekis, Eric Manton, Ewald Orf, formerly with the OSCE Missions in
Prishtina, Skopje, Tirana and Belgrade; to Michael Weiner, my former
classmate and journalist partner, now with the Austrian Development
Agency; and to Rainer Rosenberg of the Austrian National Radio, ORF.
Without his support for realising our series of features, in the framework
of ORF’s ‘Nachbar in Not’, on the desperate situation of the cities of
Pakrac and Slavonski Brod in July 1992, I would not have developed the
passion for South-Eastern Europe that he shares. I would also like to
express my sense of profound gratitude to Elsa Gopala Krishnan, now
with UNODC in Vienna, for the light shed, the conversations shared, the
sacrifices made, which were many.
Introduction to The Blood of Guatemala. A History of Race and Nation (Duke University
The year spent within the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs
following the defence of my dissertation proved invaluable to develop
and test a number of arguments. In this respect, I would like to gratefully
acknowledge the provoking exchanges with, and inspiring company of,
Ambassador Hanns Porias, Jan Kickert, Thomas Schnöll and Alexander
Bayerl who all share an enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, everything
Balkan. I am also grateful to the referees of Cambridge University Press
and its skilled editors for their extensive and helpful observations and
I would like to extend my sense of appreciation to Professors
Christoph Schreuer and Alina Lengauer and Dr Stephan Wittich, of
the University of Vienna, Kathrin Maria Scherr, Srdjan Cvijić, Monica
Arino Gutierrez, Stefan Imhof at HM Treasury, Wenke Crudopf at the
Auswärtiges Amt, Morag Goodwin and Richard Giesen of the
Universities of Maastricht and Giessen, respectively, Rebecca Everly at
Cambridge University, Felix Martin at the World Bank, Michael
Karnitschnig of the European Commission, Robert-Jan Uhl and Max
Hennig at the OSCE/ODIHR, Margarethe Matic, Peggy Herrmann,
Alessandro Ciappi, Chiara Manetti, Joy Dragland, Stephanie Le Bihan
and Catherine Clarke, for reading, thoughtfully commenting, and
improving on earlier drafts of the manuscript, or just bearing with me
when I did not know how to proceceed.
I thank Ioana Tudor for the love, enthusiasm and unfaltering support,
not only during the mad five months prior to the completion of our
doctorates in Florence, but ever since we moved to Vienna and Warsaw.
This work would also have taken a different path had it not been for the
precious advice and enduring friendship of Marcus Brand, Wolfgang
Sporrer, Andres Clerici, David del Vecchio, Harald Meier, Viola Gangl
and Nikolaus Marschik.
1 Permanent Court of International Justice
Questions concerning the Acquisition of Polish Nationality, Advisory Opinion of 15
September 1923 (Ser. B), No. 7 (1923)
Mavrommatis Palestine Concessions (Greece v. United Kingdom), Judgment of
30 August 1924 (Ser. A), No. 2 (1924)
S.S. ‘Lotus’ (France v. Turkey), Judgment of 7 September 1927 (Ser. A), No. 10 (1927)
Jurisdiction of the European Commission of the Danube between Galatz and Braila,
Advisory Opinion of 8 December 1927 (Ser. B), No. 14 (1927)
Free City of Danzig and the International Labour Organisation, Advisory Opinion of
26 August 1930 (Ser. B), No. 18 (1930)
Treatment of Polish Nationals and other Persons of Polish Origin or Speech in the Danzig
Territory, Advisory Opinion of 4 February 1932 (Ser. A/B), No. 44 (1932)
Appeal from a Judgment of the Hungaro-Czechoslovak Mixed Arbitral Tribunal (Peter
Pázmány University v. the State of Czechoslovakia) (Czechoslovakia v. Hungary),
Judgment, PCIJ (Ser. A/B), No. 61 (1933)
Legal Status of Eastern Greenland (Denmark v. Norway), Judgment of 9 April 1933
(Ser. A/B), No. 53 (1933)
Minority Schools in Albania, Advisory Opinion of 6 April 1935 (Ser. A/B), No. 64 (1935)
Lighthouses in Crete and Samos (France v. Greece), Judgment of 8 October 1937
(Ser. A/B), No. 71 (1937)
2 Permanent Court of Arbitration
Island of Palmas (United States v. Netherlands), 2 RIAA 829 (1928)
ICJ Reports [1949] 174
International Status of South-West Africa, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1950] 128
Monetary Gold Removed from Rome in 1943 (Italy v. France, United Kingdom and the
United States), ICJ Reports [1954] 19
Effect of Awards of Compensation made by the United Nations Administrative Tribunal,
Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1954] 47
Voting Procedure on Questions Relating to Reports and Petitions Concerning the
Territory of South-West Africa, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1955] 67
Admissibility of Hearings of Petitioners by the Committee on South West Africa,
Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1956] 23
Right of Passage over Indian Territory (Portugal v. India), ICJ Reports [1960] 6
Certain Expenses of the United Nations (Article 17, Paragraph 2, of the Charter),
Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1962] 151
South-West Africa (Ethiopia v. South Africa; Liberia v. South Africa), First Phase,
ICJ Reports [1962] 319
Northern Cameroons (Cameroons v. United Kingdom), Preliminary Objections,
ICJ Reports [1963] 15
South-West Africa (Ethiopia v. South Africa; Liberia v. South Africa), Second Phase
(Judgment), ICJ Reports [1966] 6
Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company Limited (Belgium v. Spain), Second
Phase, ICJ Reports [1970] 3
(South West Africa) Notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970),
Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1971] 16, as well as the respective ICJ
Pleadings, Oral Arguments, Documents, vol. I and II
Western Sahara, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [1975] 12
Immunities of the United Nations (Mazilu opinion), Advisory Opinion,
ICJ Reports [1989]
from the Aerial Incident at Lockerbie (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya v. United States),
Provisional Measures, ICJ Reports [1992] 114
Certain Phosphate Lands in Nauru (Nauru v. Australia), Preliminary Objections,
ICJ Reports [1992], as well as the respective ICJ Pleadings, Oral Arguments,
Documents, vol.1
East Timor (Portugal v. Australia), ICJ Reports [1995] 90
Preliminary Objections, ICJ Reports [1998] 115, 37 ILM 587
Legality of Use of Force (Serbia and Montenegro v. France), Preliminary Objections,
ICJ Reports [1999]
Land, Maritime Boundary between Cameroon and Nigeria (Cameroon v. Nigeria;
Equatorial Guinea intervening), 10 October 2002 (Judgment), ICJ Reports
Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports [2004] 136
4 International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadić [1995], ICTY, No. IT-94-AR72, 2 October 1995, 35 ILM
Prosecutor v. Anto Furundžija [1998], ICTY Trial Chamber II, No. IT-95–17/1,
10 December 1998, 121 ILR (2002)
Decision on Fatmir Limaj’s Request for Provisional Release [2003], ICTY Trial Chamber
II, No. IT-03–66-AR65 (Prosecutor v. Limaj et al.), 31 October 2003
Decision on Ramush Haradinaj’s Motion for Provisional Release [2005], ICTY Trial
Chamber II, No. IT-04–84-Pt, 6 June 2005
Decision on Ramush Haradinaj’s Modified Provisional Release [2006], ICTY Appeals
Chamber (Prosecutor v. Ramush Haradinaj et al.), No. IT-04–84-AR65.1,
5 European Commission/Court of Human Rights
Ilse Hess v. United Kingdom [1975], ECommHR, No. 6231/73, 28 May 1975, 2
Decisions and Reports 9
Airey v. Ireland [1979], ECtHR, No. 6289/73, 9 October 1979 (Judgment)
Trawnik v. Lennox [1985], ECommHR, 1 WLR 532, printed in 55 BYIL 525 (1984)
Leander v. Sweden [1987], ECtHR, No. 9248/81, 26 March 1987 (Judgment)
Boyle and Rice v. United Kingdom [1988], ECtHR, No. 9248/81 (Series A no. 131),
27 April 1988 (Judgment)
M. & Co. v. Federal Republic of Germany [1990], EComHR, No. 13258/87, 9 February
1990 (Decision)
Loizidou v. Turkey [1996], ECtHR, No. 40/1993/435/514, 18 December 1996 (Judgment)
Matthews v. United Kingdom [1999], ECtHR, No. 24833/94, 18 February 1999
(Judgment), 42 Yearbook ECHR 78 (1999)
Waite and Kennedy v. Germany [1999], ECtHR, No. 26083/94, 18 February 1999
Cyprus v. Turkey [2001], ECtHR, No. 25781/94, 10 May 2001 (Judgment)
Banković and Others v. Belgium and 16 Other Contracting States [2001], ECtHR, No.
52207/99, 12 December 2001, Decision (Admissibility)
Ilaşcu a.o. v. Moldova and Russia [2004], ECtHR, No. 48787/99, 8 July 2004 (Judgment)
Issa a.o. v. Turkey [2004], ECtHR, No. 31821/96, 16 November 2004 (Judgment)
Bosphorus Hava Yollary Turizm ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi (Bosphorus Airways) v.
Ireland [2005], ECtHR, No. 45036/98, 30 June 2005 (Judgment)
Saddam Hussein v. Albania et al. [2006], ECtHR, No. 23276/04, 14 March 2006,
Decision (Admissibility)
McKay v. United Kingdom [2006], ECtHR, No. 543/03, 3 October 2006 (Judgment)
Behrami & Behrami v. France [2007], ECtCR, No. 71412/01 and Saramati v. France,
Germany and Norway, No. 78166/01, ECtHR, 2 May 2007, Decision (Admissibility)
Dušan Berić a.o. v. Bosnia and Herzegovina [2007], ECtHR, Nos. 36357/04, 36360/04,
38346/04, 41705/04, 45190/04, 45578/04, 45579/04, 455580/04, 91/05, 97/05,
100/05, 101/05, 1121/05, 1123/05, 1125/05, 1129/05, 1132/05, 1133/05, 1169/05,
1172/05, 1175/05, 1177/05, 1180/05, 1185/05, 20793/05 and 25496/05, 16
October 2007, Decision (Admissibility)
6 European Court of First Instance
Yassin Abdullah Kadi v. Council of the European Union and Commission of the
European Communities [2005], Case T-315/01, 21 September 2005 (Judgment)
Yusuf & Al Barakaat International Foundation v. Council of the European Union and
Commission of the European Communities [2005], Case T-315/01, 21 September
2005 (Judgment)
7 Domestic courts
Strafsache gegen Naser Shatri [2006], Landesgericht Korneuburg, No. 405 Ur 18/06w,
2 June 2006 (Decision)
Adnan Suljanović v. the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska [1998],
BiH Human Rights Chamber, No. CH/98/230, 14 May 1998, Decision (Admissibility)
Edita Čišić and Asim Lelić v. The State of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of
Srpska [1998], BiH Human Rights Chamber, No. CH/98/231, 14 May 1998,
Dragan Čavić v. Bosnia and Herzegovina [1998], BiH Human Rights Chamber, No. CH/
98/1266, 18 December 1998, Decision (Admissibility)
Appeal of the Office of the Public Attorney of the FBiH against the Decision of the HRC of 11
March 1998 in Case No. CH/96/30, S. D. v. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
[1998], Constitutional Court of BiH, No. U 7/98, 26 February 1999 (Decision)
Municipal Council of the Municipality of West-Mostar v. the High Representative
[2000], BiH Human Rights Chamber, No. CH/00/4027 and CH/00/74, 9 March
2000, Decision (Admissibility)
Draško Radić v. The International Stabilisation Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina (SFOR)
[2000], BiH Human Rights Chamber, No. CH/00/4194, 7 June 2000, Decision
(Admissibility)
Request for Evaluation of Constitutionality of the Law on State Border Service (zakon o
dravnoj slubi) [2000], Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, No. U
9/00, 3 November 2000 (Decision)
Decision Amending the Law on Travel Documents of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Official
Gazette of Bosnia and Herzegovina No. 27/00) [2001], Constitutional Court of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, No. U 25/00, 23 March 2001
Decision on the Law on the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Official Gazette of Bosnia
and Herzegovina No. 29/00) [2001], Constitutional Court of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, No. U 26/01, 28 September 2001
Appeal of Edhem Bičakčić [2001], Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
No. U 37/01, 2 November 2001 (Ruling)
Dimitar Hajder v. Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina [2002], BiH Human Rights
Chamber, No. CH/00/3771, 5 November 2002, Decision (Admissibility)
Nedjeljko Obradović v. Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Federation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina [2002], BiH Human Rights Chamber, No. CH/02/12470, 7
November 2002, Decision (Admissibility and Merits)
Request of Živko Radišić [2004], Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
No. U 41/01, 30 January 2004, Decision (Admissibility)
Rusmir Džaferović v. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina [2004], Human Rights
Commission of the BiH Constitutional Court, No. CH/03/12932, 7 May 2004,
Decision (Merits)
Milorad Bilbija and Dragan Kalinić [2006], Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina
[2006], No. AP-953/05, 8 July 2006, Decision (Admissibility and Merits)
Guerin v. The Queen [1984], Supreme Court of Canada, 2 S.C.R. 335
Reference re Secession of Quebec [1998], Supreme Court of Canada, 20 August 1998,
2 S.C.R. 217, 37 ILM 1340
Prosecutor v. Armando dos Santos [2003], Court of Appeal of East Timor, No. 16/2001,
15 July 2003 (Decision)
Badischer Staatsgerichtshof, Freiburg (St.G.H. 3/48 (Judgment), 27 November 1948),
synopsis printed in 75:4 Archiv des Völkerrechts 481–486 (1949)
Badischer Staatsgerichtshof, Freiburg (St.G.H. 2/48 (Judgment), 15 January 1949),
synopsis printed in 75:4 Archiv des Völkerrechts 477–480 (1949)
Badischer Staatsgerichtshof, Freiburg (St.G.H 3/49 (Judgment), 31 August 1949),
synopsis printed in 75:4 Archiv des Völkerrechts 487–492 (1949)
Dalldorf a.o. v. Director of Prosecutions [1949], Control Commission Court of Appeal,
31 December 1949, 159 AD 435
Druckerei und Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H. v. Schmidts [1951], French Zone,
Superior Restitution Court of Rastatt (Franco-German Cassation
Jurisdiction), 15 February 1952, synopsis printed in 49 AJIL
Municipal Court of Prishtina (P.br. 3044/04), 16 March 2005
Suleiman Murrah and Issa Bandak v. The District Governor of Jerusalem and the President
of the Water Supply Commission (Urtas Springs Ordinance case), Supreme Court
of Palestine, 25 June 1925, 3 AD 32 (1925–1926)
Rex v. Jacobus Christian [1924], Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of South
Africa 12 AD 101 (1923–1924)
Suleiman Murrah [1926], Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1926 Appeal
Cases 321
Rex v. Bottrill, ex parte Kuechenmeister [1946], 1 All E.R. 635
R. (Al-Skeini a.o.) v. The Secretary for Defence [2005], Court of Appeal, EWCA Civ
1609, 21 December 2005
Al-Skeini a.o. v. The Secretary of Defence [2007], House of Lords [2007], UKHL 26,
Alig v. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands [1967], High Court, Appellate Division,
61 ILR 88
Mendaro v. World Bank [1983], US Court of Appeals, DC Circuit, 717 F.2d 610,
Wood Industries LLC v. United Nations, UNMIK, and the Kosovo Trust Agency [2003],
Supreme Court of the State of New York, Index No. 03/602741
Gherebi v. Bush and Rumsfeld [2003], United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit,
43 ILM 381 (2004)
Rasul et al. v. Bush et al. [2003], US Supreme Court, No. 03–334, 28 June 2004
AdöR
AöR
Annual Digest; Administrative Directive
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The United Nations is, for good reasons, reluctant to assume
responsibility for maintaining law and order, nor can it impose
a new political structure or new state institutions.
What we are involved in is nothing else than building
up the whole state from scratch.
The study The Legal Status of Territories Subject to Administration by
International Organisations is the result of three years of research at the
European University Institute in Florence, including one semester
which I spent at Madison Law School. The idea of writing this book
was conceived in Prishtina, Kosovo, in the winter of 2001. My daily
professional exposure led me to apply to the EUI, thus responding to an
urge to reflect more profoundly upon some of the legal implications of
‘political trusteeship’, and particularly on the assumption of temporary
imperium over territory by the United Nations. In the hectic environment
of the Office of the Chef de Cabinet of the resident OSCE Mission, I came to
realise that a background theory for institution-building had to be found
somewhere out there. Only a strong conceptual grounding, I believed,
could provide a recipe for good practice, whether in Kosovo or in
Ensuing conversations with friends and colleagues gravitated around
some of the concepts that emerge and recur throughout this book:
standards, status, sovereignty, representation of territory, self-determination,
internationalism, rule of law, legitimacy, fiduciary obligation, sacred
trust, accountability, legal personality and so forth. All these key terms
turned out to appear in the writing of scholars who pronounced, eight
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to an Agenda for Peace: Position Paper of the
Secretary-General on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations, UN
Doc. A/50/60-S/1995/1 (3 January 1995), x14.
Kosovo-based OSCE official, cited in Patrick Smyth, ‘In Kosovo Everything from
Teachers to Power Workers Must Be Provided’, Irish Times (9 November 1999), at 14.
LEGAL STATUS OF INTERNATIONALISED TERRITORIES
decades ago, on the ‘experimentalism’ with which the League of Nations
had pursued its internationalisation projects. From this historical perspective, the idea of a re-emergence of trusteeships in the context of
countering threats to international peace and security provided encouragement to probe deeper into the underlying assumptions of the concept of ‘internationalisation’.
Yet, in fact, there is nothing resembling a ‘grand theory’ out there, nor
do institution-building models wait on shelves, ready to be picked up on
demand. Rather, as Senada Šelo correctly observes in her thesis on
international institution-building in Bosnia, such models are ‘crafted
through trial and error process, sculpted by a long succession of moves,
deadlocks, and breakthroughs’.5 However, back in that long harsh winter
of 2001 in Kosovo – a terrain shaped in the form of a diamond, yet
utterly unglamorous – I decided to analyse aspects of the evolution of
international law and the ways in which it shaped various models of
The following thematical preface introduces the reader to the discursive fields in which the issues under consideration currently undergo
academic treatment. One concerns the ways in which generic tools and
models for reconstructing societies can be assembled and applied across
the board; the other relates to the exercise of new competencies by the
international community and the use of terminology to describe some of
its excesses.
Since the mid-1990s, the UN and other multilateral bodies have asserted
authority for the administration of war-torn territories and shouldered
the responsibility of placing them on the trajectory of political change.
The far-reaching engagement of the UN in the process of state- and
institution-building was the result of an increased multilateral effort
to create democratic institutions and market economies as a basis for
sustainable peace in societies exiting conflict. As such, these efforts were
facilitated by a changed architecture of security in the post-Cold War era6
Senada Šelo Šabić, State-Building Under Foreign Supervision: Bosnia-Herzegovina 1996–2003
(PhD thesis, on file with the EUI, 2003), at 121.
Cf., generally, Richard Haass, Intervention. The Use of American Military Force in the PostCold War World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 1999), 16; Karin von Hippel,
Democracy by Force. US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (New York:
and the redefinition of the notion of ‘threat to the peace’ in Art. 39 of the
UN Charter, resulting in an extension of the Security Council’s enforcement powers to internal armed conflicts and grave humanitarian crises.7
The authorisation of peace-building operations, characterised by a
growing use of powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and at
the same time by an increasing willingness to apply diverse enforcement
measures under Art. 41, has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively.8 This development occurred as chronic political instability, or
even the outright implosion of states, posed a challenge to the international legal order.
The growing number of international organisations involved in
‘state-building’, and the scope of authority they exercise, raises a number of important questions under international law – as to the status of
UN-administered territories, the nature of UN authority, its legal basis
in the UN Charter and its limitations, for example. Among scholars,
these new approaches to conflict management have ignited a debate over
the fundamental purposes of such practice and the extent to which
policy-making towards those ends can be improved. In this discourse,
it has become commonplace to observe that in the life-cycle of an
international territorial administration, there comes a time when the
domestic political system has developed to the point where local politicians become critical and suspicious of the continued discharge of
public authority by the international organ. Their ensuing calls for an
end to foreign dominance generates vastly different responses. They may
be addressed by a continuous devolution of power (as in East Timor
under international tutelage), or by a renewed assertion of international
power (as exemplified in Bosnia in its twelfth year under close international supervision).
A cursory review of relevant literature indicates that the ‘rule by decree’
approach to international institution-building has lost much of its
appeal. Critics have compared the international community’s assertion
of authority in Bosnia to the British Raj in early nineteenth-century
Cambridge University Press, 2000); and James Dobbins et al., The UN’s Role in NationBuilding. From the Congo to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005).
For a general discussion, cf. Danesh Sarooshi, The United Nations and the Development of
Collective Security. The Delegation by the Security Council of Chapter VII Powers (Oxford:
For enforcement measures, cf. David Schweigman, The Authority of the Security Council
under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Legal Limits and the Role of the International Court
of Justice (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), at 51.
India, likening the international High Representative to an ‘uncomfortable caricature of a Utilitarian despot’.9 There, the ongoing imposition
of legislation is seen to deprive local political institutions of any responsibility and reduces elected assemblies to toothless bodies rubberstamping
legislation not of their own making. Referring to its transitional administration of East Timor, Jarat Chopra analogised the competences of the
Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to those of ‘a preconstitutional monarch in a sovereign kingdom’10 where models of
good governance are developed through the discharge of ‘benevolent
despotism’. Likewise, Justice Goldstone concluded that an over-broad
international authority in Kosovo would be ‘a mistake of the colonial
mentality’.11 From this vantage point, the internationally supervised
political reconstruction of Kosovo and Bosnia appears evocative of
the ‘White Man’s Burden’ that proved a powerful justification of
nineteenth-century empires.12
Recent criticisms of the international administration of territory
follow a thread of thought that can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s
eloquent formulation of the fiduciary duties of a colonial power, and
the notions of accountability to which the latter must be subject.13
Following Burke, present writing on the topic is mostly concerned with
elaborating the argument that progress towards developing democratic
structures is, through a process of local mimicry, bound to remain slow
and incomplete if the means employed towards that end resemble
For a ‘neo-Burkean’ critique of the interventionist paradigm interpreted as imperialist
concept in disguise, see Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, ‘Travails of the European Raj:
Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 14:3 Journal of Democracy 60–74 (2003), 66–67.
Cf. also European Stability Initiative, Reshaping International Priorities in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Part 2. International Power in Bosnia (March 2000).
Jarat Chopra, ‘The UN’s Kingdom of East Timor’, 42:3 Survival 27–36 (2000), at 27–28.
Goldstone, quoted by Jacob Kreilkamp, ‘UN Postconflict Reconstruction’, 35 NYUJILP
619–670 (2003), at 668.
For BiH, cf. David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (London: Pluto Press,
1999), at 64. Accordingly, Europe is regularly charged with ‘postcolonial imperialism’ in its
neighbourhood. Cf., e.g., Ian Johnstone, UN Peacebuilding: Consent, Coercion and the Crisis
of State Failure. From Territorial Sovereignty to Human Security 186 (Proceedings of the Annual
Conference of the Canadian Council of International Law, 2000), at 196. A similarly stereotypical image of peace-building is painted by Roland Paris, ‘International Peacebuilding and
the ‘‘Mission Civilisatrice’’’, 28 RIS 637–656 (2002).
Cf. his celebrated speech in the House of Commons in support of Charles Fox’s motion to
abolish the East India Company’s dominion in India (1 December 1783), ‘The Writing and
Speeches of Edmund Burke’, in India: Madras and Bengal (vol. V ed. P. J. Marshall, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981), at 385. See also Mark Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of
Backward Territory in International Law (London: Longmans, 1926), at 330.
authoritarian administration.14 Simon Chesterman phrases what he believes
to be the central policy dilemma facing international administrations in
the following way: ‘how does one help a population prepare for democratic governance and the rule of law by imposing a form of benevolent
autocracy?’15
‘Participatory’ models that include both in-built provisions for
establishing a partnership with local institutions and constitutional
structures tying international authority into the long-term interest of
the governed population are frequently recommended as potentially
more successful in the medium term and more sustainable in the long
run.16 Recent treatments of this subject matter emphasise the importance of good governance, accountability and legitimacy in the context
of the international community’s transitional administration of territory. In what appears to be an onslaught on the prevalent peacebuilding orthodoxy, Michael Ignatieff critiques what he terms the
‘neocolonialist’ aspects of international territorial administration and
the tendency of international agents to ‘perennialise’ their stronghold
over key competencies:
The United Nations once oversaw discrete development projects. Now it
takes over political and administrative infrastructure of entire nations
and rebuilds them from scratch . . . [T]here is an imperial premise at work
here: Wealthy strangers are taking upon themselves the right to rule over
those too poor, too conflict-ridden, to rule themselves. If it is . . . imperialism, is it benign? Only if it succeeds: if [the territory] learns to rule itself,
then these well-paid agents of the international conscience do themselves
Cf. Richard Caplan, A New Trusteeship? The International Administration of WarTorn Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), at 54–55.
Simon Chesterman, You, the People. The United Nations, Transitional Administration
and State-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), at 127. Cf. also the Report
by the CoE Political Affairs Committee, Strengthening of Democratic Institutions in
Bosnia and Herzegovina (Doc. 10196, 4 June 2004), x35. The report is an example of
the excessive tone with which the CoE launches its diatribes against the HR. Referring to
the HR’s continuing authority to dismiss public officials that he finds in breach of the
Dayton Agreements, the Rapporteur believed that ‘such powers . . . are reminiscent of a
totalitarian régime’ (x39, emphasis supplied).
Cf., generally, Ian Smillie (ed.), Patronage or Partnership: Local Capacity Building in
Humanitarian Crises (Westport, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001); Thomas Carothers, Aiding
Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1999); UNDP, Development Dimensions of Conflict Prevention and
Peace-Building (study prepared by Bernard Wood for the Emergency Response
Division, New York: UNDP, 2001).
out of a job. But no one knows if it will succeed. And the omens are not
These associations – ‘benign imperialism’, ‘autocracy’ reminiscent of a
‘totalitarian régime’, ‘sovereign kingdom’, ‘absolutist monarchy’, ‘dictatorship of virtue’ – and the authorities that rule them – ‘benevolent
despot’, ‘pre-constitutional monarch’, ‘neo-colonial administration’18 –
have considerable appeal. Not only are they easily comprehensible, they
also gnaw away at internationalist legitimacy. Under closer scrutiny they
do, however, harbour distinct and mutually exclusive identities. The
fiduciary exercise of administrative powers with the authorisation of
the UN Security Council differs significantly from imperial or colonial
rule where tasks were carried out in the interest of the metropolitan
power. Detached from the context of decolonisation, references to the
alleged resurrection of the UN’s Trusteeship system will also not suffice
to capture the most important features of the phenomenon of internationalisation. As William Bain observes, it is impossible to confirm
the ‘reality’ of a resurrected practice of trusteeship on account of the
extraordinary executive and legislative powers exhibited in cases that are
in fact constitutionally different. The attempt to ‘trade on the paternal
discourse of empire, which embraced trusteeship in a righteous mission
of civilisation ordained by divine providence is, in this particular context misleading’.19 One of the underlying themes of this study is that
such metaphorical extensions and attempts to transpose, in a wholesale
fashion, aspects of national democratic accountability, are indeed ill
suited to capture the elusive phenomenon of international territorial
administration and the peculiar ways in which it temporarily configures
In a second, related discourse, it has become en vogue to proceed from
Bosnia via Kosovo to East Timor (and extend the trajectory to Afghanistan
Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor. Ethnic War and Modern Conscience (New York:
Henry Holt, 1997), at 79–80.
All previous characterisations mentioned here appear in the literature quoted above,
except ‘dictatorship of virtue’ (in Robert Hayden, ‘Why Political Union Cannot be
Imposed by Foreign Powers. Bosnia: The Contradictions of ‘‘Democracy’’ Without
Consent’, 7:2 EECR (1998)), ‘absolutist monarchy’ (in Markus Benzing, ‘Midwifing a
New State: The United Nations in East Timor’, 9 Max Planck YUNL 295–372 (2005), at
343), and ‘benevolent despot’ (in Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, ‘Wohlwollende
Despoten’, FAZ, 25 July 2003 (p. 9).
William Bain, Between Anarchy and Society. Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), at 148 and 149.
and Iraq). The framework of international authority set up by the
Dayton Peace Agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina is regularly juxtaposed with that of UN Security Council Resolutions 1244 (1999) and
1272 (1999) that have mandated UNMIK and UNTAET, respectively.
Contrasting scopes of authority, operational aims, bureaucratic organisation and endeavouring to cross-evaluate performance and measure
the pace of devolution of competencies have become stalwart features of
comparative studies of international institution-building. Yet, finding
reliable ways to gauge these elements and analysing how they cluster at
the level of whole polities usually proves difficult.20 Comparing evidence
of a policy’s impact in one institution-building context with policies
that are pursued under different local conditions is a tricky occupation
indeed. The overwhelming number of items that would have to be
correlated suggests that comparative studies can explain the impact of
only a segment of institution-building policies. Further, attributing a
variance in a situation to the operation of an institutional arrangement
becomes more difficult the more one expands the observation timeframe. Take, for instance, the UN’s transitional authority in East Timor,
widely held up by the international community as a rare example of a
UN success in nation-building: the breakdown of civil order, in spring
2006, forced it to reflect more critically upon the early closure of the
UNTAET mission in 2002 and the impact of its efforts to build a selfsufficient nation.
Notwithstanding such methodological difficulties, proponents of
comparative studies in international institutions and peace-building
are eager to move rapidly from the realm of theory and disputation to
the task of ‘getting on with reality’. Those who ‘model’ international
administration have allowed themselves in a number of instances to
over-promise and to arouse expectations that will not be fulfilled in the
immediate future. Operating in a world over-eager for prompt results,
As Philippe Schmitter aptly remarked in what amounts to a substantial self-critique of his
quality-of-democracy research, ‘one type of organisation for which there exists data –
whether it is trade unions or bowling societies – can be quite unrepresentative of
collective actions that are occurring elsewhere in society’ (‘The Ambiguous Virtues of
Democracy’, 15:4 Journal of Democracy 47–60 (2004), at 50). For one of the few
examples of a useful analysis comparing such administrations’ activities within
sector-specific competencies, see, however, Richard Caplan, International Governance
of War-Torn Territories. Rule and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), at 45 et seq.
they frame sweeping recommendations concerning ‘ingredients’ for
successful peace-building by suggesting standardised socio-economic
‘tool-kits’ – or even ‘standard operating procedures’ – that should aid
the development of liberal democracy in internationalised territories.21
In short, the elaboration of a generic framework for multilateral intervention – very much aimed at conceiving modules for a ‘Government
out of the Box’ – has undoubtedly become an academic growth discipline in which its exponents make passionate assessments of the impact
of ‘models’ of international territorial governance, yet refrain from
examining its normative underpinnings.22
Passion is, however, a distortive lens that makes it hard to perceive the
precise shape of things. By looking solely at ‘output’ variables, studies of
international missions tend to ignore crucial aspects and dispositive
issues that would contribute to a macro-performance analysis. As Noah
Feldman remarked, the assumption that successful institutions can be
built on the basis of a menu of options in which the nation-builder
chooses a ‘parliamentary system from column A, judicial review from
column B, and a type of federalism from column C’ is highly problematic.23 The relative stability of the contents of such a tool-box over the
twentieth century may represent a source of blindness for internationalists as it tempts them to place different conflicts in similar conceptual
frames.24 While broad organisational templates may be transferable, a
state-building project is sensitive to the nature of the recipient and the
local body politic.
Second, proponents of ‘justice’ and ‘framework packages’ for postconflict administrative efforts have proven to pay scant attention to a
For an example of such scattered analysis, see Outi Korhonen and Jutta Gras,
International Governance in Post-Conflict Situations (Helsinki: Forum Juris, 2001), at
145 et seq. For further examples of sweeping generalisations on the legitimacy of models
of ‘proxy governance’, see, e.g., Fen O. Hampson, ‘Can Peacebuilding Work?’, 30
Cornell ILJ 701–716 (1997), at 707 et seq.
Cf. the report of the high-level workshop organised by the Crisis Management Initiative,
State-Building and Strengthening of Civilian Administration in Post-Conflict Societies and
Failed States (Helsinki, September 2004), at 22 et seq. Regarding further suggestions to the
UN to put together model legislation in ‘framework packages’ for an emergency legal system,
see also the recommendations in Honoring Human Rights under International Mandates:
Lessons from Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2003), at 19.
Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq. War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton,
NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), at 143, n. 23.
Nathaniel Berman, ‘Intervention in a ‘‘Divided World’’: Axes of Legitimacy’, 19:4 EJIL
743–769 (2006), at 754.
much wider problem: following a Chapter VII authorisation, a coherent
body of meta-rules applicable to the organisation of local justice and the
review of international normative acts is sorely missing, as is the willingness of transitional administrators to swiftly correct those shortcomings. In short, while the ‘rule of law’ has gained widespread recognition
as a panacea for problems associated with the aftermath of war, technocrats of peace-building have showered less attention on the issue of how,
concretely, an international administration can be made subject to it.
Advocates of prefab emergency constitutions spend even less time on
conceiving an alternative legal design of mandates governing the process
of long-term reconstruction, or on ways in which a polycentric institutional arrangement in which spheres of competence are divided between
local and international institutions can provide favourable conditions
for collective democratic action.
The task I have set myself in writing this book is decidedly more modest.
Its objective consists in interrogating the idiosyncratic character of
trusteeship and the multifarious ways in which it became subjected to
legal appropriation by the international community in the twentieth
century. In other words, this study is an exercise in exploring the legal
background assumptions and frames that inform theories of international institution-building under temporary trustee administration.
Its underlying objective is to rescue public international law from its
abduction by pragmatic management. This seems particularly appropriate as the international system is rapidly developing, and experimenting with, new forms of political authority which enable it to effectively
respond and directly participate in the governance of such territories
with a view to restructuring their domestic constitutional order.25 A
discussion of the spatial response of the international community,
namely its imposition of a temporary international ‘trusteeship’, will
form the outer margins of the present study. However, the legal frameworks discussed cannot be analysed in vacuo. They are naturally related
to the realm of Vorstellungen, ideas of how international society should
be designed. In short, these conceptions are predicated upon two
assumptions. The method of ‘internationalisation’ is informed by a
Marcus Cox, The Making of a Bosnian State: International Law and the Authority of the
International Community (PhD on file with the University of Cambridge, 2001), at 2.
substantive belief in the universality and rationality of international authority. As a corollary, internationalisation projects appear to be based on a
paradigm that has its intellectual roots in what has been labelled ‘liberal
internationalism’.26
Being concerned with internationalisation of territory, this book is
primarily a legal analysis, yet it is also a historical study to the extent
that the League’s Mandate system, through the evolution of fiduciary
bonds as means of international governance, has structured the legal
instruments available to international society today. The discussion
does not purport to reflect upon the multiplicity of specific historic
situations in which internationalisation was utilised, but merely intends
to enable us to determine the typological locus of a historical and legal
phenomenon. I thus aim to first approximate and then delineate some
particular traits of an ‘ideal type’ of territorial internationalisation. At
the same time, this study strikes at the heart of the current debate over
the powers that the UN exercise both within an internationalised
territory and from outside. Its supreme organ, the Security Council, is
increasingly called upon to balance the sovereign’s weight of the inviolable
and static borders against indigenous bids at determining the dynamic
‘self ’ in a people.
There are several different methods available to academic lawyers in
order to carry out their pursuits. By looking at the ways through which
international authority carries out internationalisation projects, I aim to
explain how legal instruments have been designed in order to respond to
a spatio-temporal need of the international community. I have adopted
a broad topological style which interrogates where and how to ‘locate’
the background assumptions guiding the idea of international fiduciary
administration, in legal and philosophical space. At the outset it is
appropriate to caution the reader that the analysis presented here is, so
to speak, ‘undisciplined’ in that it transgresses the academic boundaries
between traditional international law, sociological jurisprudence and
legal history. Accordingly, it strays in and out of the two academic
territories of international law and the social sciences.
The study uses at least three ‘archetypical’ forms of propositions in
classical international law method: the empirical form (‘this is the
practice of states’); the deductive or analytical form (‘given a rule of
Cf. Nathaniel Berman, ‘Legalizing Jerusalem or, Of Law, Fantasy, and Faith’, 45 Catholic
University LR 823–835 (1995–1996), at 826, as well as Roland Paris, ‘Peacebuilding and
the Limits of Liberal Internationalism’, 22:2 International Security 54–89 (1997), at 55.
logical consistency, rule B follows deductively from rule A’); and the
teleological form (‘this proposition leads to the most desirable result’).27
Clearly, the translation of ‘is’ statements to ‘ought’ propositions makes
the arguments vulnerable to the dual positivist charges of collapsing the
separation between law and sociology and of embracing a non-scientific
operation that seeks to create a syntactical construct out of norms
without regard to their value content.28 The solution I have adopted
here is that whenever the book switches into ‘policy mode’ and prescription, hence linking values and preferences with actual events, I
explicitly refer to the assumptions and sources from which it derives
such ‘ought patterns’. Especially in the presentation of ‘interests’, held
both by the international community and by a non-state territorial
entity, but also in the conceptualisation of partial legal personality, I
have been careful to clarify my observational standpoint and not to let
public international law evaporate from the analysis.
In order to identify the relevant topoi and the units of research, I will
briefly introduce the frameworks utilised to approach the status of a
non-state territorial entity under temporary international administration. The overall structure presented here is straightforward. In
chapters 1 and 2, I survey twentieth-century activity in the area of
internationalisation and analyse the methods leading to it, from an in
rem perspective on the one hand, and a law-of-obligation one on the
other. There, my aim is to investigate to what extent the sovereignty
frame structures available approaches to the internationalisation of
territory. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the status of a nonstate territorial entity under international tutelage and the dual functions of the UN organ administering it. Chapters 1–4 will, in various
ways, tackle the issue of how such an entity relates to the international
legal plane and, vice versa, how the international legal structure directly
reaches the subjects of its concern. I contend that the practice of submitting territories to international administration both challenges and
consolidates the international legal Grundnorm of sovereign equality.
No doubt, temporary international governance of post-conflict territories defies traditional notions of accountability that flow from the
identification of the ‘sovereign’. Yet, on the other hand, such a practice
This categorisation draws on Philip Allott’s ‘Language, Method and the Nature of
International Law’, 45 BYIL 79–135 (1971), at 80.
The classical statement is presented in the preface to Kelsen’s Die Reine Rechtslehre:
Einleitung in die rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik (1st edn. 1934, Aalen: Sciencia, 1994).
consolidates traditional notions of sovereign equality by underlining the
anomalous and temporary nature of an international administration that
works towards the telos of resuscitating representation of a territory –
and title to it – through its stated vision of enhancing local capacity to
an extent that such a dependent territory be reintegrated into its preconflict structure (Eastern Slavonia) or stand by itself (East Timor).
The book follows a ‘cartographical’ style in which selection of the
object of research appears to oscillate between a structural and phenomenological view. This broad approach is necessary in order to map the
‘grids’ and coordinates within which the concept of internationalisation
can be situated. I have therefore adopted a number of distinct methods.
The notion of sovereignty in international law owes much to the combination of the private law concept of property (dominium) and the
public law notion of imperium – the claim to indivisible authority.
Discussing instances in state practice where dominium and imperium
were ‘divorced’ from each other, I begin by analysing how the internationalisation of territory can be appreciated from an in rem point of
view. The forms utilised in chapter 1 will thus be both analytical and
Chapter 2 consists in an inquiry into the nature of an internationalised territory in the twentieth century and seeks to answer some of the
conceptual questions arising from the uneasy relationship between the
title to territory – legal sovereignty – and indigenous claims to selfdetermination in moments of international societal expansion. As we
shall see, jurists encountered analytical obstacles when attempting to
‘categorise’ fiduciary administrations in accordance with the in rem
perspective. This static view, propounded inter alia by Quincy Wright
with regard to the Mandate system,29 has of course been frequently
criticised not only for positing law as a normative repository independent
of ethics and sociology,30 but also for overlooking the auto-regulatory
function of international law and its capacity to recreate itself through
the occurrence of compliance on the part of the states which deem
themselves subject to its normative range. The discussion in chapter 2
of the change in normative spheres heralded by the League’s Mandate
system therefore applies a methodology that emphasises the policy
implications of jurisprudential developments.
Mandates under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930).
See, for instance, Hans Morgenthau, ‘Positivism, Functionalism and International Law’,
34 AJIL 260–284 (1940), at 261–262.
In an article criticising post-conflict governance of territories by the
international community for failing to implement minimum standards
of accountability, Outi Korhonen observes that as such deep interventions become increasingly frequent, the more difficult it would be to
‘leave the spectator hanging on indeterminate positions towards sovereignty and the identity of power’.31 One of the aims of chapter 2 is to
turn the argument on its head by demonstrating that the concept of
fiduciary administration has, from its inception in the wake of the
‘displacement’ of sovereignty, instituted a system of reciprocal rights
and duties in which international law finds its new ‘essential basis’ in
times of transition. Such fluid arrangements of reciprocal international
obligations, developed within the framework of the Mandate and
Trusteeship systems, have, of course, influenced the Security Council’s
current self-authorised practice of territorial administration in anomalous situations. Administration in trust, as a new institution in Lord
McNair’s analysis, has created new international legal instruments
which do without sovereignty as the basis for legal representation of
territory and the people within it. ‘Law’ will thus be presented as an
instrument with which international society gradually responded to the
changing needs of territories that came to be administered under the
‘sacred trust of civilisation’. By using this second contextual frame,
devised by what is commonly referred to as the New Haven School,32
I intend to telescope a process commencing at Versailles and its reconfiguration of political authority at the periphery, via the process of
decolonisation and the dismantling of imperial units, to a period after
the Cold War in which the ties between the notion of legitimate statehood and the protection of individual human rights emerged strengthened and consolidated. Chapter 2 is hence designed as a corollary to
positivist jurisprudence, which holds that ‘existing’ rules emanate solely
from entities deemed equally ‘sovereign’.33 By applying two competing
Outi Korhonen, ‘‘‘Post’’ as Justification: International Law and Democracy Building
after Iraq’, 4:7 German LJ 709–723 (2003), at 723.
The principal delineation of the ‘New Haven School’ approach is presented in Harold
Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal, Jurisprudence for a Free Society: Studies in Law, Science
and Policy (New Haven, CT: New Haven Press, 1992). For the contextual, problemoriented and multi-method approach of such ‘configurative’ jurisprudence, cf. also
McDougal et al., ‘Theories about International Law: Prologue to a Configurative
Jurisprudence’, 8 Virginia JIL 188–299 (1967–1968).
For the classic statement of states as ‘units’ of international law, see H. L. A. Hart, The
Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), at 191.
forms and methods, chapters 1 and 2 aim at drawing dialectical counterimages of the notion of ‘suspension’ of sovereignty.
Chapter 3 builds on the second – not merely in terms of continuing
the substantive focus on developments precipitated by the creation of
the UN Council for Namibia. Seeking to ‘construct’ limited legal
personality of territories temporarily administered by the international community, my argument utilises a similar method – i.e. the
teleological form, which advocates that in the achievement of ‘community values’, international institutions be given the authority to make
decisions in support of those values, even if the rules of positivism do
not fully support the same result.34 By crystallising legal concepts in
jurisprudential technique, the teleological form frames legal propositions as growing out of a social context. Namibia’s decolonisation
project is accordingly presented in prescriptive terms which resemble
the methodology employed by what has come to be known as Transnational Legal Process. According to this school of thought, which
opposes autonomous theories of law, policy-makers should be striving
to take account of the changes in normative spheres generated within the
transnational socio-political context – in the instance discussed here, by
granting UN-administered entities access to the international legal
plane. My aim in chapter 3 is to re-cast the question of the status of
non-state territorial entities as a problem of nascent legal personality
which, as I suggest, is constructed at the intersection of international
need and municipal desert. The constructive approach to international
legal personality solidifies the argument that a non-state territorial
entity administered by the international community may base its
claim towards partial personality on a legal argument.
In chapter 4 I follow Transnational Legal Process and incorporate
values and ‘interests’ into the analysis which are held beyond those of the
state system and implicitly challenge the positivist doctrine of sources in
the achievement of those values. I try to argue that an international
administering agent is situated at the precise interface between domestic
and international politics and law, and that its roles are split into agent
and organ functions. The gist of the argument can be summarised as
follows: an international administration represents a non-state territorial entity on the international plane as its agent. Second, as an ancillary
Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘New International Legal Process’, in The Methods of International
Law 79–107 (eds. S. Ratner and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Washington, DC: 36 ASIL Studies in
Transnational Legal Policy, 2004), at 79.
organ of the UN, a territorial administration dispenses temporary political authority in order to carry out the functions, and meet the needs, of
The interrelation between conceptions of trust and legal sovereignty
provides the thematic continuity underlying the diversity and detail of
chapters 5–8. Turning ‘inwards’ into the politics of an internationalised
territory in chapter 5, I introduce the peculiar problématique of an openended institution-building mandate and apply the theoretical observations made in the preceding analysis. In order to indicate spheres in
which those conclusions are of policy significance, I have included a
memo to the Kosovo Prime Minister and a hypothetical case study.
Kosovo before and during the efforts to resolve its status in international
law represents the main case study of the book; the investigation is
telescoped into chapter 6, which focuses exclusively on the ‘status
process’ and the wider implications, in international law, of Kosovo’s
possible independence. Special attention is given to the role of the
Contact Group and its flexible cooperation with UNOSEK and the
‘Troika’ which took the lead in negotiations in August 2007. The inquiry
into the fading role of UNMIK and the evolving responsibility of its
successor, the International Civilian Representative, is not a definitive
one. At the time the manuscript was finalised, the first was in a state of
phasing out and exiting, whereas the latter was about to deploy its presence
following Kosovo’s declaration of independence in February 2008.
Chapters 7 and 8 reach beyond an across-the-board criticism of
international administrations and point at systemic constraints that
might indeed limit the success of UN territorial governance. The distinct
forms and styles utilised here consciously mirror those applied in
chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 7 begins by conceptualising how claims to
the ‘legitimate’ exercise of power are framed under conditions of internationalisation. It uses a Weberian approach to explore how the
pursuit of divergent ‘interests’ of local and international actors –
which I maintain is inherent in an ‘open-ended’ institution-building
mandate of a fiduciary nature – impacts on the legitimacy of international political authority. By focusing on the particularities of the normative space within an internationalised territory, chapter 8 then
applies the analytical method of positivism to arrive at conclusions
about the lex lata and its problematic relation to what jurists refer to
as the formal ‘legality’ of a legal order. The inquiry into the normative
defects of an order created by the UN is pertinent since its politics find
their sole recognised basis of legitimation in the protection of human
rights and the diffusion of rule of law standards. The main argument here
relates to the ‘messiness’ of constitutional arrangements in an interim
period in which our expectations of an emerging Rechtsstaat under
international tutelage, including conceptions of norm control, appear
The ‘coordinates’ of a thus-constructed mental map can obviously
not be located on a simple temporal axis. I have avoided the language of
‘generations’ of peacekeeping, as well as the ‘old/new’ dichotomy that is
frequently employed in academic writing with a view to providing a
linear narrative of the conceptual evolution of the internationalisation
of territory and the increasingly assertive role of the UN’s institutional
structure. Consequently, this study does not provide a comprehensive
retrospective of cases in which an international organisation assumed
limited powers in a domestic arena. As William Bain notes in one of his
recent critiques of the instrumental mind, the rich mass of facts that
have been dumped into the category ‘international administration’,
‘some of which call attention to similarities and others to differences,
leaves us with a large collection of facts in the same way that the sum of a
large collection of zeros is still zero’.35 Where they fail to illustrate a
specific theoretical point, somewhat less advanced adventures in international governance – Leticia, Memel, the United Nations Mission in
Libya (UNMIL), Eritrea and Congo, UNOSOM II in Somalia, the multidimensional peace-maintenance operations UNTAG in Namibia and
UNTAC in Cambodia, as well as the more recent examples of the EU
Administration over Mostar, UNAMA in Afghanistan, UNAMI in Iraq,
and UNMIL in Liberia, to name a few – will not be discussed.36
Whereas the extent of the administrative prerogatives held by multilateral bodies in what will be termed ‘internationalised territories’ appears
unprecedented, it is one of my objectives to de-mystify the alleged novelty
of the legal instruments used, in order to supply a somewhat sober analysis
of how to integrate such a practice in an evolving system of international
law. As Ralph Wilde has pointed out, there is an inherent flaw in positioning the UN’s undertakings in Kosovo and East Timor as the latest pinnacles
‘In Praise of Folly: International Administration and the Corruption of Humanity’, 82:3
International Affairs 525–538 (2006), at 528.
Two publications will make up for my omissions: Carsten Stahn, The Law and Practice
of International Territorial Administration: Versailles to Iraq and Beyond (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ralph Wilde, International Territorial Administration:
How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away (Oxford: Oxford University
of a progressive increase of complex intervention, in the culmination of a
historical process.37 We must, however, also avoid drawing an exceptionalist portrait that places international territorial administrations beyond
historical experience and applicable legal frameworks. This study endeavours, if anything, to point out novelties and exceptionalism when appropriate, while indicating continuity and precedence when apposite. The
result of such a topological approach is hence not the production of one
single mental map, but of layers of a palimpsest through which the conceptual contours of internationalised territories become discernible.
Two final, technical notes are in order. Sometimes history is unkind
to researchers whose work has been accepted for publication in the wake
of international developments that affect one of the case studies under
consideration. The inquiry into the shrinking role of UNMIK and the
evolving roles of the new international civil and military presences
remains a ‘moving target’. As new developments occurred, I incorporated them in the manuscript up until December 2007. But, naturally,
I was not in a position to focus on some of the legal developments
prompted by the transition from one international authority to another.
Second, I have drawn on a number of working papers, letter exchanges
and policy documents that have not been, and will never be, published.
In advanced bureaucratic organisations, the exchange of ‘non-papers’
and ‘memos’ drawn up by informal working groups and circulated
among advisers, foreign service officers and other mandarins is a complex social ritual by which access to information is bestowed, limited
and denied. This is also the case in the world of UN field missions and
their ancillary components. Where I believed that such internal papers
actually influenced official policy, I have quoted from their substance. In
the bibliography, the reader will see whether the quoted documentary
material is drawn from an open source or whether it remains on file with
Cf. Ralph Wilde, ‘Representing International Territorial Administration: A Critique of
Some Approaches’, 15:1 EJIL 71–96 (2004), 80 et seq. The ‘Brahimi Report’ placed the
two ‘deep’ post-Cold War administration missions – Kosovo and East Timor – in a class
of their own as responding to ‘extreme’ situations (Report of the Panel on United Nations
Peace Operations, UN Doc. A/55/305, S2000/809, 39 ILM 1432 (2000), see esp. xx19 and
77). For Hansjörg Strohmeyer, the ‘scope of the challenges and responsibilities deriving
from [UNMIK’s and UNTAET’s] mandates was unprecedented in United Nations
peacekeeping operations’ (‘Collapse and Reconstruction of a Judicial System: The
United Nations Missions in Kosovo and East Timor’, 95:1 AJIL 46–63 (2001), at 46).
Referring to processes and methods of transferring effective control over
territory, this first chapter concentrates on territories under international administration as experimental models of ‘restricted sovereignty’.
One of its major thrusts consists in arguing that the demands of political
reality have forced sovereign states for centuries to consent to agreements by which they relinquished a portion of their sovereignty – of the
suprema potestas – in favour of another sovereign entity.38 Likewise, as
James Crawford pointed out, the establishment of autonomous entities
under a form of international protection, supervision, or guarantees has
been a ‘persistent form of organisation of territories disputed between
States on strategic or ethnic or other grounds’.39 We shall pursue these
two arguments by interrogating an analogy, drawn by Grotius, Pufendorf
and Selden, between the Roman private law concept of dominium and
sovereignty over territory. While the analogy allows us to grasp the key
conception of the institution of ‘legal sovereignty’, it also permits us to
examine the various practices which were instrumental in devising
exceptions to the application of dominium over territory. We will
hence begin by adopting an in rem perspective in order to capture
international legal solutions that were applied to situations in which
title to territory had been divorced from imperium, or what German
constitutional doctrine refers to as Gebietshoheit.
The dry re-application of Roman law concepts is, in our submission, a
necessary means to disentangle the contested idea of sovereignty from
cognate notions of ‘supreme will’ and ‘absolute command’ that have
marred the term’s transformation since Bodin and Hobbes. Having
established the analogy between Roman private law instruments and
the notion of territorial sovereignty, we turn to the methodology
Cf. Patrick Daillier and Alain Pellet, Droit International Public (6th edn., Paris: Librairie
générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1999), at x313.
The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), at 160.
through which ‘régimes’ of restricted sovereignty have been created, and
eventually to the establishment of entities temporarily administered by the
UN. We provide a first normative frame within which the transfer of
imperium from a sovereign power to a protecting entity, with the former
retaining the sovereign claim as a bare title, can be located. This in rem
perspective will be later utilised to capture some aspects of the phenomenon of an international administration which is caught between honouring the ‘suspended’ title of the sovereign and the fiduciary obligations it is
mandated to pursue with respect to the territory in which it exercises
temporary imperium.
While these are the broad themes this chapter seeks to explore, we
begin by addressing two interrelated issues that have been debated in
literature: (i), the transfer of effective control, through ‘horizontal’
means (treaty), by a state to another entity that leaves the old sovereign
with a nudum ius he can still dispose of, as developed by doctrine and
jurisprudence, and as practised by states; (ii), the capacity of the UN to
administer territory, and to ‘vertically impose’ a transfer of effective
control, based on Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The mandate and
extent of the authority of UN Missions in internationalised territories
such as Kosovo, and their status in international law, will then be
interpreted as the synthesis between the horizontal tradition of transferring effective control and the application of vertical instruments in
1.1 Horizontal transfer of effective control and the
bare title to territory
This section aims to bring into sharper focus the concept of residual
sovereignty through the prism of the horizontal dynamics that governed
the transfer of effective control, as distinct from title to territory, and
applies it to the model of international territorial administration.40 The
concept of ‘suspended’ sovereignty is not at all new to legal and political
discourse in international relations.41 It is increasingly employed when
investigating the properties of territories under international administration
Parts of this section appeared in my ‘UN Imperium: Horizontal and Vertical Transfer of
Effective Control and the Concept of Residual Sovereignty in ‘‘Internationalised’’
Territories’, 7 Austrian RIEL 3–52 (2002).
A rough typology of state practice regarding non-sovereign entities with limited (or
restricted) international personality is provided by Méir Ydit, Internationalised Territories.
From the ‘Free City of Cracow’ to the ‘Free City of Berlin’. A Study in the Historical
which were conceived on the basis of a distinct multilateral settlement.42
An analysis of instances involving a disjunction of notions of sovereignty
and territorial control includes a reappraisal of the relationship between
imperium and dominium; their duality adds a conceptual mediation to
the definition of sovereignty.
The acceptance of territorial sovereignty as a ‘rule of recognition’ at the
settlement of Westphalia meant that mutually exclusive areas were
carved out for the exercise of supreme authority, with the sovereigns
recognising only this form of political organisation as legitimate. The
adoption of Roman private law concepts represented a ‘convenient way
of squaring their claims to supremacy with the mutual recognition of
equality’.43 Dominium, in this sense, represented the ‘ultimate legal title
beyond and above which there was no other’44 and involved both an
obligation on the part of others to abstain from all interference, and the
right of its holder to act on the territory, a faculty of absolute disposition. ‘Titular sovereignty’ in international law has thus been used to
describe the right of exclusive ownership which a state may have over
any particular portion of territory,45 with the territorial sovereign
exercising effective control similar to an owner of an object. Similar
to continental legal conceptions, sovereignty would also be conceptualised as an analogon to dominium in common law systems. As
O’Connell explains, the common law theory of title ‘still has its roots
in feudal law with the Crown having the ultimate reversion and proprietary rights being explained in terms of vassalage. Accordingly,
Development of a Modern Notion in International Law and International Relations
(1815–1960) (Leiden: A. W. Sythoff, 1961), at 19–20. See also J. H. W. Verzijl,
International Law in Historical P