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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