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Part III The Sources of International Responsibility, Ch.32 The Notion of Circumstances Precluding Wrongfulness

Sandra Szurek

From: The Law of International Responsibility

Edited By: James Crawford, Alain Pellet, Simon Olleson, Kate Parlett

From: Oxford Public International Law (http://opil.ouplaw.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved.date: 28 September 2023

Subject(s):
Responsibility of states — Wrongful acts — Circumstances precluding wrongfulness — Self-defence — Armed forces — Countermeasures — Necessity — Codification — Peremptory norms / ius cogens
A shield rather than a sword, to use the wording of the ILC,1 the circumstances that the Articles on State Responsibility envisage as precluding the wrongfulness of an act function, according to Crawford, to ‘protect the State against an otherwise well-founded accusation of wrongful conduct’.2 The law of international responsibility has always included, as is the case in domestic law, several ‘excuses’, ‘justifying facts’, and ‘exonerating exceptions’ which, by virtue of the occurrence of certain circumstances, have the effect of preventing the engagement of the...
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