Agence France Presse
July 22, 2010
Kosovo declaration did not break international law: UN court
Mariette le Roux
The UN’s top court gave legal backing Thursday to Kosovo’s 2008 independence declaration, saying it conformed to international law as Serbia insisted it would never recognise the move.
The non-binding finding was greeted with euphoria among Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population, who hooted car horns in delight while their president said it removed the last vestiges of doubt over independence.
But Serbian President Boris Tadic said Serbia would never recognise Kosovo’s independence, while his foreign minister appealed to the minority Serb community concentrated in the north of Kosovo to remain calm.
“Serbia of course will never recognise the unilaterally proclaimed independence of Kosovo because it believes that unilateral, ethnically motivated secession is not in accordance with the principles of the United Nations,” Tadic said.
The United States welcomed the move, while Serb ally Russia said its stance against Kosovo’s self-declared independence would not change.
The United Nations, for its part, warned against “provocative” actions after the verdict, while the European Union offered to broker dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo.
“By 10 votes to four, (the court) is of the opinion that the declaration of independence of Kosovo adopted on 17 February 2008 did not violate international law,” ICJ president Hisashi Owada told a crowded courtroom in The Hague.
“General international law contains no applicable prohibition of declarations of independence.”
One dissenting judge, however, believed his colleagues had erred and said that Kosovo’s declaration was in fact “unlawful and invalid”.
Landlocked Kosovo, with its two million inhabitants — 90 percent of them ethnic Albanians — unilaterally declared independence from Serbia after UN-brokered negotiations to resolve its future status failed.
Kosovo had effectively been a UN protectorate since a 1998-99 war between separatist Kosovo Albanians and Serbian security forces ended with a NATO air campaign against Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s regime.
Serbia has always regarded Kosovo as its southern province — a point it reiterated after Thursday’s verdict.
Tadic said Belgrade will seek a new UN resolution calling for talks on the issue, while Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic appealed for calm.
“Difficult days are ahead of us … It is of crucial importance to keep the peace and to stabilise the entire territory of the province (Kosovo),” the minister said outside the Peace Palace.
Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu said the verdict removed “all doubts” about the territory’s independence and called on more countries to “recognise the republic of Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state.”
Sixty-nine countries recognise Kosovo as independent, including the United States and all but five of the 27 EU member states.
The UN General Assembly asked the ICJ in October 2008 to render a legal opinion on the issue, at Serbia’s request.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called “on all states to move beyond the issue of Kosovo’s status and engage constructively in support of peace and stability in the Balkans, and we call on those states that have not yet done so to recognise Kosovo.”
US Vice President Joe Biden reached out to Serbia by telephoning president Tadic and urging him to “work constructively to resolve practical issues with Kosovo,” his office said.
The Russian foreign ministry said its “position on the non-recognition of the independence of Kosovo remains unchanged”, and backed Serbia in calling for further negotiations on Kosovo’s status — a move Pristina rejects.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged all sides “to avoid any steps that could be seen as provocative and derail the dialogue,” his spokesman said.
EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said meanwhile Brussels was “ready to facilitate a process of dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade” towards “progress on the path to Europe.”
[David Peterson, renewned researcher and long-time writing partner of Professor Ed Herman, wrote this at the time the ICJ’s judgment was published:
This ruling by the International Court of Justice astounds me. Has the ICJ bought-into the rhetoric of “responsibility to protect” and “humanitarian” war? In other words, has the ICJ taken the notorious phrase in defense of NATO’s 1999 bombing war, “illegal but legitimate,” and rewritten it to read both legal and legitimate?
First, you bomb a country into submission, outside the context of the Security Council, where one or more Permanent Member would have vetoed the resort to war.
Then you establish your military presence on the ground, but this time resorting to the Security Council to provide legitimation after the fact.
And some nine years later, you issue a declaration of independence in the name of the majority population of the province within the country that you bombed into submission and subsequently occupied — and though this country takes this acquisition of territory by force to the ICJ, the ICJ fails to find anything wrong with it!
The Court has concluded above that the adoption of the declaration of independence of 17 February 2008 did not violate general international law, Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) or the Constitutional Framework. Consequently the adoption of that declaration did not violate any applicable rule of international law. [para. 122]
Talk about running-the-table. When the same Republic of Serbia (though at the time it was known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) back in 1999 tried to enlist the ICJ to enjoin ten countries then participating in the U.S. bombing war against it, the ICJ declined to lift a finger, reasoning that as the “United States…’has not consented to jurisdiction…and will not do so’…the Court cannot exercise jurisdiction’.”]
Our comments:
Although the ICJ, unlike the ICTY and all the other ‘ad-hoc tribunals’, was established legally under the powers of the UN Charter, this judgment shows the ICJ to be yet another court ready to abandon the rule of law. The 1999 Nato bombing of Serbia was obviously illegal under all relevant international law, under the UN Charter and even under the Nato Charter, which at the time the bombing commenced still restricted Nato to a purely defensive role. It was not until May 1999, several months after the bombing started, that Nato amended its Charter to allow itself to take offensive military action. Without any question the ICJ should have upheld the Serbian claim.
It was also clearly quite wrong for Nato leaders to decide to bomb Serbia. Nato had no official or constitutional standing to intervene in any way in the sovereign affairs of Yugoslavia. In doing so, it was itself in flagrant beach of the UN Charter in launching aggression against a Sovereign state.