Symposium : Assessing the Work of the International Law Commission on State Responsibility

• Spinedi, Marina

Abstract

The article traces the progressive abandonment by the International Law Commission in the 1960s and 1970s of a strictly bilateralist conception of the legal relations arising from internationally wrongful acts of a state. This shift towards multilateralism, in contrast to the following period of codification work by the ILC, was limited to the consequences of wrongful acts which injure the fundamental interests of the international community (termed ‘international crimes’ by the ILC) and concerned solely the possibility of countermeasures (or sanctions) being adopted by subjects other than the state directly affected by the wrongful act. The author examines the reasoning which led Special Rapporteur Ago and the other ILC members to this move towards multilateralism and investigates whether this development can be linked to the positions taken by the ILC in the early 1960s regarding the invalidity of treaties contrary to <it>jus cogens</it> and the suspension&sol;termination of multilateral treaties as a consequence of their breach, where such a shift towards multilateralism had already taken place.