State Responsibility

Annexed to GA Resolution 56/83 of 2001, the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts put the international law of responsibility on a sound footing. As Special Rapporteur for the second reading, James Crawford helped steer it to a successful conclusion. With this book, he provides a detailed analysis of the general law of international responsibility and the place of state responsibility in particular within that framework. It serves as a companion to The International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility: Introduction, Text and Commentaries (Cambridge, 2002) and is essential reading for scholars and practitioners concerned with issues of international responsibility, whether they arise in interstate relations, in the context of arbitration or litigation, or in bringing international claims.

Table of Contents

Part I – The framework of responsibility 

1 – Historical development 

2 – Key concepts 

3 – Corollaries of breach of an international obligation 

Part II – Attribution to the state 

4 – Organs and entities exercising governmental authority

5 – Direction or control by the state 

6 – Other cases of attribution 

Part III – Breach 

7 – Breach: the material element 

8 – Breach: the temporal element 

9 – Circumstances precluding wrongfulness

Part IV – Collective or ancillary responsibility 

10 – Responsibility in cases of joint or collective conduct

11 – Responsibility for breaches of communitarian norms

12 – Ancillary and secondary responsibility 

13 – Succession to responsibility

Part V – Cessation and reparation

14 – Restoration of legal relations after breach

15 – Reparation

16 – Remedies

Part VI – The implementation of responsibility

17 – The claims process

18 – Claims on behalf of others: diplomatic and functional protection

19 – Implementation of responsibility by judicial process

20 – Invocation in cases involving multiple parties

21 – Implementation of responsibility by extrajudicial process

Appendix 1 – ILC Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001)

Appendix 2 – General Assembly resolutions concerning the Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts

Appendix 3 – ILC Draft Articles on Diplomatic Protection (2006)

Appendix 4 – ILC Draft Articles on State Responsibility(as proposed by F. V. Garda-Amador, 1961)1

Appendix 5 – I LC Draft Articles on State Responsibility (as adopted on first reading, 1996)

Appendix 6 – ILC Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (2011)

About the Author

James Crawford is Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge. From 1997 to 2001 he was the ILC Special Rapporteur on State Responsibility.