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Uti possidetis juris or uti possidetis iuris (Latin for "as [you] possess under law") is a principle of international law which provides that newly formed sovereign states should retain the internal borders that their preceding dependent area had before their independence.
Uti possidetis juris is a modified form of uti possidetis ; created for the purpose of avoiding terra nullius , the original version of uti possidetis began as a Roman law governing the rightful possession of property. During the medieval period it evolved into a law governing international relations and has recently (1820s) been modified for situations related to newly independent states.
Uti possidetis juris has been applied in modern history to such regions as South America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union, and numerous other regions where centralized governments were broken up, where imperial rulers were overthrown, or where League of Nations mandates ended, e.g. Mandatory Palestine and Nauru. It is often applied to prevent foreign intervention by eliminating any contested terra nullius , or no man's land, that foreign powers could claim, or to prevent disputes that could emerge with the possibility of redrawing the borders of new states after their independence.
Controversially, the doctrine has been claimed in relation to Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, although (with the exception of East Jerusalem since 1980) Israel has not claimed these territories explicitly, and withdrew from Gaza in 2005. [1]
The principle was also applied by the Badinter Arbitration Committee in opinions related to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, specifically no. 2, on self-determination, and no. 3, on the nature of the boundaries between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. [2]
Argentina and Chile base their territorial claims in Antarctica on the uti possidetis juris principle in the same manner as their now-recognized Patagonian claims. [3]
The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States is a treaty signed at Montevideo, Uruguay, on December 26, 1933, during the Seventh International Conference of American States. At the conference, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared the Good Neighbor Policy, which opposed U.S. armed intervention in inter-American affairs. The convention was signed by 19 states. The acceptance of three of the signatories was subject to minor reservations. Those states were Brazil, Peru and the United States.
Self-determination refers to a people's right to form its own political entity, and internal self-determination is the right to representative government with full suffrage.
Territorial integrity is the principle under international law where sovereign states have a right to defend their borders and all territory in them from another state. It is enshrined in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and has been recognized as customary international law. Under this principle, forcible imposition of a border change is an act of aggression.
Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning "nobody's land". Since the nineteenth century it has occasionally been used in international law as a principle to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state's occupation of it. There are currently three territories sometimes claimed to be terra nullius: Bir Tawil, four pockets of land near the Danube due to the Croatia–Serbia border dispute, and parts of Antarctica, principally Marie Byrd Land.
The International law bearing on issues of Arab–Israeli conflict, which became a major arena of regional and international tension since the birth of Israel in 1948, resulting in several disputes between a number of Arab countries and Israel.
Uti possidetis is an expression that originated in Roman private law, where it was the name of a procedure about possession of land. Later, by a misleading analogy, it was transferred to international law, where it has had more than one meaning, all concerning sovereign right to territory.
The status of territories captured by Israel is the status of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, all of which were captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Malcolm Nathan Shaw KC is a British legal academic, author, editor and lawyer.
The Arbitration Commission of the Conference on Yugoslavia was an arbitration body set up by the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community (EEC) on 27 August 1991 to provide the conference on Yugoslavia with legal advice. Robert Badinter was appointed to President of the five-member Commission consisting of presidents of Constitutional Courts in the EEC. The Arbitration Commission has handed down fifteen opinions on "major legal questions" raised by the conflict between several republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).
The political status of Kosovo, also known as the Kosovo question, is the subject of a long-running political and territorial dispute between the Serbian government and the Government of Kosovo, stemming from the breakup of Yugoslavia (1991–92) and the ensuing Kosovo War (1998–99). In 1999, the administration of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija was handed on an interim basis to the United Nations under the terms of UNSCR 1244 which ended the Kosovo conflict of that year. That resolution reaffirmed the territorial integrity of Serbia over Kosovo but required the UN administration to promote the establishment of 'substantial autonomy and self-government' for Kosovo pending a 'final settlement' for negotiation between the parties.
The partition of Quebec refers to the secession of regions of the province of Quebec, rather than to partitions in a strict political sense. It is usually discussed as a possibility in the event of Quebec secession from Canada. It was not a key issue in either the 1980 Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty or the 1995 Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty, but dominated the politics of national unity for about two years in the aftermath of the second referendum. Since then, the issue has occasionally resurfaced.
On 22 July 1971 Salvador Allende and Alejandro Lanusse, the Presidents of Chile and Argentina, signed an arbitration agreement. This agreement related to their dispute over the territorial and maritime boundaries between them, and in particular the title to the Picton, Nueva and Lennox islands near the extreme end of the American continent, which was submitted to binding arbitration under the auspices of the United Kingdom government.
Alexandre de Gusmão was a Portuguese diplomat from Colonial Brazil. He is regarded as one of the best diplomats of his time, chiefly for his role in negotiating the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, when Portugal and Spain were attempting to delimit their territorial possessions in South America and Asia.
Croatia and Germany established diplomatic relations on 15 January 1992. Croatia has an embassy in Berlin and five consulates general in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart. Germany has an embassy in Zagreb and an honorary consulate in Split.
Accordance with International Law of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Respect of Kosovo was a request in 2008 for an advisory opinion referred to the International Court of Justice by the United Nations General Assembly regarding the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence. The territory of Kosovo is the subject of a dispute between Serbia and the Republic of Kosovo established by the declaration. This was the first case regarding a unilateral declaration of independence to be brought before the court.
The Boundary Treaty of 1866 between Chile and Bolivia, also called the Mutual Benefits Treaty, was signed in Santiago de Chile on August 10, 1866, by the Chilean Foreign Affairs Minister Alvaro Covarrubias and the Bolivian Plenipotentiary in Santiago Juan R. Muñoz Cabrera. It drew, for the first time, the border between both countries at the 24° South parallel from the Pacific Ocean to the eastern border of Chile and defined a zone of bipartite tax collection, the "Mutual Benefits zone", and tax preferences for articles from Bolivia and Chile.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law is an expression meaning that ownership is easier to maintain if one has possession of something, or difficult to enforce if one does not. The expression is also stated as "possession is ten points of the law", which is credited as derived from the Scottish expression "possession is eleven points in the law, and they say there are but twelve."
The Burkina Faso-Niger frontier dispute case (2013) was a public international law case with the International Court of Justice served by the West African states of Burkina Faso and Niger, which share a border. Both nations submitted a border dispute to the court in 2010. The court delivered its judgement in 2013, and the parties implemented it in 2015 and 2016.
The Benin–Niger border is 277 km in length and runs from the tripoint with Burkina Faso in the west to the tripoint with Nigeria in the east.
The Colombian–Peruvian territorial dispute was a territorial dispute between Colombia and Peru, which, until 1916, also included Ecuador. The dispute had its origins on each country's interpretation of what Real Cedulas Spain used to precisely define its possessions in the Americas. After independence, all of Spain's former territories signed and agreed to proclaim their limits in the basis of the principle of uti possidetis juris, which regarded the Spanish borders of 1810 as the borders of the new republics. However, conflicting claims and disagreements between the newly formed countries eventually escalated to the point of armed conflicts on several occasions.