Original scientific paper

The right to international traffic and UN traffic sanctions: the negation of a fundamental right of a state?

Davorin Lapaš ; Faculty of law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

The issue of sanctions and their legal nature is one of the most controversial issues in contemporary international law as a normative system with a so-called “horizontal structure”, over whose subjects there is, in principle, no higher authority.
Traffic sanctions are even more specific because, by their content (interruption of traffic connections with the affected country), they do not violate the country’s subjective international law. Namely, the maintenance of traffic connections, like any other type of international communication in international law, depends on the will of the states desiring to maintain such traffic with other countries.
A question remains, however, about the extent to which these traffic sanctions encroach upon the subjective right of “third” countries to maintain international traffic with the affected country (e.g. UN traffic sanctions).
In addition, there is a question of the justification of the transfer of the real application of the content of these sanctions to the relations among the entities of the so-called “private sector” – natural or legal persons belonging to the state-object or to the state-subject of these sanctions. The very content of these sanctions is necessarily directed at the very relations of such private legal subjects. Therefore, it seems that in the case of traffic sanctions, as in the case of economic sanctions, their precise orientation towards the political elite of the state-object of such measures (being directly liable for the violation of international law) would, instead of overall sanctions, significantly contribute not only to their efficiency but also to the legitimacy and morality of their application.

Keywords

international transport sanctions; the United Nations; fundamental rights of states

Hrčak ID:

20422

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/20422

Publication date:

18.1.2008.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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