It’s a degree the Kremlin makes obsessively; President Vladimir Putin reiterated it when UN Secretary-Basic António Guterres visited Moscow in late April: the ‘Donetsk and Luhansk Individuals’s Republics’ have simply as a lot proper to declare their independence as Kosovo did in 2008.

Russia invoked this Balkan ‘precedent’ to justify recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (the UN and most states think about them nonetheless a part of Georgia) in 2008 and annexing Crimea in 2014. In a world ruled by energy relations, the place all of the instruments of multilateralism appear ineffective, invocations of worldwide regulation have by no means been extra audible.

However what precisely does the UN Constitution say? It’s based mostly on two probably contradictory rules: respect for states’ sovereignty and territorial integrity, and peoples’ proper to self-determination. The UN helped steer the decolonisation course of from the Sixties and chapter XI of its Constitution defines a particular class of ‘Belief and Non-Self-Governing Territories’; at present there are 17 of those, together with Western Sahara, Gibraltar and a few British dominions, New Caledonia and French Polynesia — the final of which was restored to the listing in 2013 after an extended absence, in response to a marketing campaign by the pro-independence social gathering Tavini Huiraatira.

Issues modified with the breakup of the federal communist states of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, resulting in a proliferation of newly unbiased states that continued into this century and unfold to different areas, together with Eritrea, East Timor and South Sudan. Slovakia and the Czech Republic agreed a swift, amicable divorce, however the different two breakups proved more durable. In Yugoslavia, some claims to the best to secede, assured underneath the 1974 structure, had been contested; and within the USSR, competing claims led to issues: if the Soviet Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan gained independence, what was to be completed concerning the autonomous area of Nagorno-Karabakh, (…)

Full article: 1 884 phrases.

Jean-Arnault Dérens

Jean-Arnault Dérens is editor of Le Courrier des Balkans and, with Laurent Geslin, co-author of Là où se mêlent les eaux: des Balkans au Caucase (The place waters mingle: from the Balkans to the Caucasus), La Découverte, Paris, 2018.