State Sovereignty In International Law

The current international scenario is dynamic in nature, full of interstate interactions and full of subjects (if you can call them subjects under traditional international law) that are not states. After the Peace of Westphalia —and even prior to that— the “sovereignty” of states has been the driving force of most international relations; consequently, the states were considered to be the only subjects of intentional law disregarding individuals as subjects of international law. Another major issue of international law that derives form the notion of state sovereignty is law enforcement; because there is nothing above state sovereignty, and states should be regarded as the only subjects of international law, enforcement of treaties becomes

For purposes of this paper, Thomas Hobbes’s theory will be the one mainly contrasted. Thomas Hobbes was an English political theorist who put forward theories on state sovereignty, individual rights and human nature in his work Leviathan (1651). Throughout his work (Leviathan), Hobbes poses that before political society men lived under a state of nature. Under this state of nature, humans lived under a perpetual fear, progress was overall inexistent and death would be a common phenomenon; basically, every man had the right to survive by any means necessary, including murder. Because of this perpetual state of fear, humans would resort to giving all their inherent rights to a supreme being in exchange for protection. The accumulation of all the natural rights of men would be the Leviathan, a sea monster that had all the power and rights of its own. According to Hobbes’ theory, this was the birth of the state, which had the right and obligation to rule over its subjects. Looking on this theory more broadly, we could imagine the world filled with different Leviathans (states) that were ruled by the same principles as humans had done before their creation, the state of nature. This state of nature allowed the new states to have the same right of survival that the humans had before, meaning that they could wage

This international body was created by the enactment of the Charter of the United Nations, which stated that its main function was the maintenance of peace, recognised that its power came from the states that created it and firmly stressed the importance of the sovereignty of each nation. By accepting the importance of state sovereignty, the UN recognises state superiority and accepted its role as both guardian and mediator. More importantly, it looked for peace by engaging on a contractual agreement, or treaty, in which each nation refrain from using their natural state rights; meaning that instead of giving up their rights as “Leviathans” to a bigger entity, the states simply agreed that they would restraint from using them. To ensure that this principle was met, the UN created two bodies: the Security Council and The International Court of Justice (ICJ). The main purpose of the Security Council is peace keeping through any means necesary; consequently it is the only body that can violate the sovereignty of a nation. The structure of the Council consist of five permanent members with individual veto powers and ten rotating ones. One might argue that the five veto system breaks the equality principle of the United Nations in which every country has equal rights and obligations regardless of their power. This is because of the fact that there is the need to acknowledge superior military