Sovereignty

Sovereignty includes the following sweeping powers and rights.

(1) The power to wield authority over all the individuals living in the territory. This power might even be regarded as the quintessence of sovereignty.

(2) The power to freely use and dispose of the territory under the State's jurisdiction and perform all activities deemed necessary or beneficial to the population living there.

(3) The right that no other State intrude in the State's territory (so-called jus excludendi alias, or the right to exclude others).

States have always vigorously protested and claimed compensation when foreign Sates have exercised on their territory public activities that had not been previously authorized. They have also reacted in this way when the public action on their territory had been performed secretly or by State agents allegedly acting as private individuals.

(4) The right to immunity for State representatives acting in their official capacity (so-called functional immunity). Acts performed by State officials in international relations must be imputed not to the individuals acting on behalf of the State, but to the State itself. Consequently individuals cannot be brought to trial and punished by foreign States for any official act, if such act happens to be contrary to international law. They are exempt from the foreign substantive law for acts and transactions performed in their official capacity and may only be prosecuted and punished by their own national courts.

(5) The right to immunity from the jurisdiction of foreign courts for acts or actions performed by the State in its sovereign capacity, and for execution measures taken against the use or planned use of public property or assets for the discharge of public functions. (The question, however, of defining these classes of acts or actions, or the public nature of assets, remains controversial.)

(6) The right to respect for life and property of the State's nationals and State officials abroad.

Legal equality

Legal equality implies that, formally speaking, no member of the international community can be placed at a disadvantage: all must be treated on the same footing.

Self-determination of peoples

Self-determination appears firmly entrenched in the corpus of international law in only three areas: as an anti-colonialist standard, as a ban on foreign military occupation, and as a requirement that all racial groups be given full access to government. Peoples under colonial domination have the right to external self-determination, that is, to opt for the establishment of a sovereign State, or the free association or integration with an independent State, or 'the emergence into any other political status freely determined by the people' (1970 UN Declaration on Friendly-Relations). The same right accrues to peoples subjected to foreign military occupation, after their obtaining or recovering independence. Any racial group denied full access to government in a sovereign State is entitled to either external self-determination (independence, integration into an existing State, etc.) or even internal self-determination (that is, in the words of the Supreme Court of Canada in Reference re Secession of Quebec, the 'pursuit of its political, economic, social and cultural development within the framework of an existing State').

More specifically, there now exists in the body of international law both a general principle, serving as an overarching guideline, and a set of specific customary rules dealing with individual issues (the rule on the external self-determination of colonial peoples and peoples under foreign occupation; the rule on the internal self-determination, of racial groups that have been subject to discrimination in being denied equal access to government). These rules specify, with regard to certain areas, the general principle. The role of the principle is to cast light on borderline situations and to serve as a general standard for the interpretation of both .customary and treaty law.

The principles discussed above are closely intertwined: They supplement and support one another and also condition each other's application. International subjects must comply with all of them. Also, in the application of any one of the principles, all the others must simultaneously be borne in mind.