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Have agreed as follows:
Article 1
A State Party to the Covenant that becomes a party to the present Protocol recognizes the competence of the Committee to receive and consider communications from individuals subject to its jurisdiction who claim to be victims of a violation by that State Party of any of the rights set forth in the Covenant. No communication shall be received by the Committee if it concerns a State Party to the Covenant which is not a party to the present Protocol.
Article 2
Subject to the provisions of article 1, individuals who claim that any of their rights enumerated in the Covenant have been violated and who have exhausted all available domestic remedies may submit a written communication to the Committee for consideration.
Article 3
The Committee shall consider inadmissible any communication under the present Protocol which is anonymous, or which it considers to be an abuse of the rights of submission of such communications or to be incompatible with the provisions of the Covenant.
Article 4
1.Subject to the provisions of article 3, the Committee shall bring any communications submitted to it under the present Protocol to the attention of the State Party to the present Protocol alleged to be violating any provisions of the Covenant.
2.Within six months, the receiving State shall submit to the Committee written explanations or statements clarifying the matter and the remedy, if any, that may have been taken by that State.
Article 5
1. The Committee shall consider communications received under the present Protocol in the light of all written
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information made available to it by the individual and by the State Party concerned.
2. The Committee shall not consider any communication from an individual unless it has ascertained that:
1)The same matter is not being examined under another procedure of international investigation or settlement;
2)The individual has exhausted all available domestic remedies. This shall not be the rule where the application of the remedies is unreasonably prolonged.
3.The Committee shall hold closed meetings when examining communications under the present Protocol.
4.The Committee shall forward its views to the State Party concerned and to the individual.
Article 6
The Committee shall include in its annual report under article 45 of the Covenant a summary of its activities under the present Protocol.
Article 7
Pending the achievement of the objectives of resolution 1514 (XV) adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 14 December 1960 concerning the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the provisions of the present Protocol shall in no way limit the right of petition granted to these peoples by the Charter of the United Nations and other international conventions and instruments under the United Nations and its specialized agencies.
Article 10
The provisions of the present Protocol shall extend to all parts of federal States without any limitations or exceptions.
Article 11
1. Any State Party to the present Protocol may propose an amendment and file it with the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The Secretary-General shall thereupon communicate any proposed amendments to the States Par-
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ties to the present Protocol with a request that they notify him whether they favour a conference of States Parties for the purpose of considering and voting upon the proposal. In the event that at least one third of the States Parties favours such a conference, the Secretary-General shall convene the conference under the auspices of the United Nations. Any amendment adopted by a majority of the States Parties present and voting at the conference shall be submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations for approval.
2.Amendments shall come into force when they have been approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations and accepted by a two-thirds majority of the States Parties to the present Protocol in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.
3.When amendments come into force, they shall be binding on those States Parties which have accepted them, other States Parties still being bound by the provisions of the present Protocol and any earlier amendment which they have accepted.
III
Just War Theory
Just war theory is probably the most influential perspective on the ethics of war and peace. The just war tradition has enjoyed a long and distinguished pedigree, including such notables as Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine. Many of the rules developed by the just war tradition have since been codified into contemporary international laws governing armed conflict, such as The United Nations Charter and The Hague and Geneva Conventions. The tradition has thus been doubly influential, dominating both moral and legal discourse surrounding war. It sets the tone, and the parameters, for the great debate.
Just war theory can be meaningfully divided into three parts, which in the literature are referred to, for the sake of convenience, in Latin. These parts are: 1) jus ad bellum, which concerns the justice of resorting to war in the first place; 2) jus in bello, which concerns the justice of conduct
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within war, after it has begun; and 3) jus post bellum, which concerns the justice of peace agreements and the termination phase of war.
2.1. Jus ad bellum
The rules of jus ad bellum are addressed, first and foremost, to heads of state. Since political leaders are the ones who inaugurate wars, setting their armed forces in motion, they are to be held accountable to jus ad bellum principles. If they fail in that responsibility, then they commit war crimes. In the language of the Nuremberg prosecutors, aggressive leaders who launch unjust wars commit “crimes against peace.” What constitutes a just or unjust resort to armed force is disclosed to us by the rules of jus ad bellum. Just war theory contends that, for any resort to war to be justified, a political community, or state, must fulfil each and every one of the following six requirements:
1. Just cause. This is clearly the most important rule; it sets the tone for everything which follows. A state may launch a war only for the right reason. The just causes most frequently mentioned include: self-defence from external attack; the defence of others from such; the protection of innocents from brutal, aggressive regimes; and punishment for a grievous wrongdoing which remains uncorrected. Vitoria suggested that all the just causes be subsumed under the one category of “a wrong received.”
Walzer, and most modern just war theorists, speak of the one just cause for resorting to war being the resistance of aggression. Aggression is the use of armed force in violation of someone else's basic rights.
The basic rights of two kinds of entity are involved here: those of states; and those of their individual citizens. International law affirms that states have many rights, notably those to political sovereignty and territorial integrity. It thus affirms that aggression involves the use of armed forces – armies, navies, air forces, marines, missiles – in violation of these rights. Classic cases would be Nazi Ger-
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many into Poland in 1939, and Iraq into Kuwait in 1990, wherein the aggressor used its armed forces to invade the territory of the victim, overthrow its government and establish a new regime in its place. Crucially, the commission of aggression causes the aggressor to forfeit its own state rights, thereby permitting violent resistance. An aggressor has no right not to be warred against in defence; indeed, it has the duty to stop its rights-violating aggression.
But why do states have rights? The only respectable answer seems to be that they need these rights to protect their people and to help provide them with the objects of their human rights. As John Locke, and the U.S. Founding Fathers, declared: governments are instituted among people to realize the basic rights of those people. If governments do so, they are legitimate; if not, they have neither right nor reason to exist. This is vital: from the moral point of view, only legitimate governments have rights, including those to go to war. We need a theory of legitimate governance to ground just war theory, and Aquinas perhaps saw this more clearly than any classical member of the tradition. This connection to legitimacy is consistent with the perspective on war offered so far: war, at its heart, is a violent clash over how a territory and its people are to be governed.
Based on international law (see Roth), it seems like there are three basic criteria for a legitimate government. If these conditions are met, the state in question has rights to govern and to be left in peace. They are as follows. First, the state is recognized as legitimate by its own people and by the international community. There is an uncoerced general peace and order within that society, and the state is not shunned as a pariah by the rest of the world. Second, the state avoids violating the rights of other legitimate states. In particular, legitimate governments don't commit aggression against other societies. Finally, legitimate states make every reasonable effort to satisfy the human rights of their own citizens, notably those to life,