Chapter

Pacific Island States and international humanitarian law

Roger S. Clark

Asia-Pacific perspectives on international humanitarian law

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2020

p. 199-219

English

The chapter outlines chronologically a series of actions by Pacific people and governments driven by the twin threat of other peoples' conflicts and nuclear radiation to present and future generations of island-dwellers. A particular focus of this chapter is two items of litigation on nuclear weapons in the International Court of Justice. In the first, the Advisory Proceedings on the Legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, legal teams representing the Marshall islands, Samoa and Solomon islands combined their resources to present powerful unified arguments. The second is proceedings brought by Marshall Islands endeavouring to enforce treaty and customary law obligations on the nuclear powers to negotiate in good faith to rid the world of these weapons. The chapter also looks at Samoa and Solomon Islands' active participation in the negotiations of the Rome Statute, in particular Samoa's interest in expanding the forbidden weapons provisions of Article 8 of the Rome Statute.

• Full text : restricted access (ICRC)

• Asia-Pacific perspectives on international humanitarian law / ed. by Suzannah Linton,Tim McCormack [and] Sandesh Sivakumaran