Eighth Report on State Responsibility

Abstract
This Report reflects the hopeless, vain struggle between the Special Rapporteur and the majority of the Commission, particularly the ILC members from the major powers. The Special Rapporteur proposed a … civilized reaction to “State crimes” consisting, first, of indispensable steps by the main UN political organs, and finally of a decisive judicial pronouncement by the International Court of Justice. The Majority of the Commission remained obsessively attached to the idea that the reaction to “State crimes”, however denominated, should be left to the United Nations security system, particularly to the Security Council’s ineffective action (or inaction) characterized by the lack of impartiality deriving from the absurd post-war, unjust composition of the Council. The majority relied upon the negative position on the very notion of “State crimes” as proposed in Ago’s Article 19 in the first part of the articles. The literature was equally hostile to the “State crimes” concept. One author (Professor Bruno Simma) warned the Special Rapporteur, after sarcastically describing his proposal, that the “customers” of the ILC were the States themselves. The present writer prefers to believe that the task of the ILC is indicated in Article 3 of the Charter which speaks clearly of the “progressive development of international law”. As Professor Brierly pointed out in his commentary to the ILC Statute, “progressive development” was the essential task of the Commission, while codification proper should have been left to the Universities. Just as a matter of progressive development (de lege ferenda), the present writer proposed the above indicated reaction to “State crimes”. The reluctance of the ILC majority could perhaps have been overcome by presenting the Rapporteur’s proposal in a separate ILC resolution to be submitted to the General Assembly as an document to additional the resolution containing the articles, stressing thus that it was a matter of progressive development