3 - State Responsibility

Summary

This chapter starts from a familiar question: is State responsibility in international law usefully understood on the model of domestic private law or on that of domestic criminal law or neither? It then discusses the attractions and limits of the model of private law. It then turns to ‘international crimes’ or ‘serious breach[es] of an obligation arising under a peremptory norm of general international law’ as defined in the International Law Commission's successive works and discusses the ways in which the provisions for such wrongs seem analogous or disanalogous to domestic criminal law. The next section takes up the suggestion that a distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ law is conceptually and practically preferable to that between ‘international crimes’ and ‘international delicts’: is this the best way to capture a category of international wrongs that merit a distinctive response? The final section asks whether State responsibility thus understood can usefully be seen as a species of ‘criminal’ responsibility and whether it offers domestic theorists a fruitful way of ‘deconstructing’ criminal law.