Available in Russian
Author: Alexey Ispolinov
DOI: 10.21128/2226-2059-2024-4-69-84
Keywords: persistent objector rule; international custom; International Court of Justice; ILC Conclusions on the identification of customary international law; peremptory norms
The article critically evaluates the importance of the rule of the persistently objecting State in the modern law of international customs, considering this rule as primarily an academic fiction, which has not yet been reflected in the treaty norms of international law. The inclusion of this rule by the International Law Commission in the final text of the Draft Conclusions on the Identification of Customary International Law (Conclusion 15) has given new impetus to discussions on the legal significance of this rule and its effectiveness in terms of the sufficiency of State practice in its application. The article questions the statement of the ILC, given in the comments to Conclusion 15, that this rule is “often used and recognized in both international and domestic judicial practice”, since in almost all the decisions of international and national courts cited in this respect by the ILC those courts limited themselves to a brief indication of the existence of this rule in the reasoning part of their decision. In addition, there have been no cases in international practice where a State has managed to avoid international responsibility for its violation of international custom by referring in its justification only to the persistant objector rule. The lack of relevant State practice regarding the application of the persistant objector rule gives sufficient grounds to assert that this rule has not yet become binding and is still in the initial stage of its transformation into a customary rule of law, awaiting both the creation of a stable and widespread practice of a significant number of States and their opinio juris. In this regard, the ILC’s Conclusion 15 can be considered not as a reflection of an already existing customary rule of international law, but as a de lege ferenda, that is, the ILC vision of what this rule should look like. The article concludes by admitting that this rule has a low probability of obtaining the status of a binding norm of international law.
About the author: Alexey Ispolinov – Doctor of Sciences in Law, Visiting Professor, Russian Foreign Trade Academy, Moscow, Russia.
Citation:
Ispolinov A. (2024) Paradoks pravila nastoychivo vozrazhayushego gosudarstva v prave mezhdunarodnykh obychaev [The paradox of the persistent objector rule in the law of international customs]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol.14, no.4, pp.69–84. (In Russian).
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