第2讲 国际法上的主权问题(英文文献材料).doc

Professor Henkin’s View of Sovereignty Louis Henkin, International Law: Politics and Values 9-10 (1995). Sovereignty, a conception deriving from the relations between a prince and his/her subjects, is not a necessary or appropriate external attribute for the abstraction we call a state For international relations, surely for international law, it is a term largely unnecessary and better avoided. For legal purposes at least, we might do well to relegate the term sovereignty to the shelf of history as a relic from an earlier era. To this end, it is necessary to analyze, decompose, the concept; to identify the elements that have been deemed to be inherent in, or to derive from, sovereignty; in a system of states at the turn of the twenty-first century. Louis Henkin, Sibley Lecture, March 1994 Human Rights and Sate “Sovereignty”, 25 Ga. J. Intl Comp. L. 31 (1995/1996). Elsewhere, I have expressed the view that, as applied to states in the international system, sovereignty is a mistake, indeed a mistake built upon mistakes, which has barnacled an unfortunate mythology. [FN2] A political idea describing the locus of ultimate legitimate authority in national society, “sovereignty” has been transmuted into an axiom of the inter-state system, which has become a barrier to international governance, to the growth of international law, and to the realization of human values. I suggested the need to deconstruct the concept, strip it of its myth, identify its essentials, *32 retain only its valuable values. The assumptions of “sovereignty” Among the traditional assumptions sometimes deemed implicit in international “sovereignty,” one might identify the following: --that the state system is committed exclusively to state values, principally to state autonomy and the impermeability of state territory, and to the welfare of the state as a monolithic entity; --that international law is based on the consent of states, and is made only by states and only for states; --that