State Responsibility Project

About the Project

The Project started in 1997 when the Centre's Director, Professor James Crawford became the International Law Commission Special Rapporteur on State Responsibility. This site charts the history of the work on State responsibility between 1996 and 2001 and collates the materials relating to this work to form a Document Collection of nearly all the relevant historical documents for that period.

History of the work on State responsibility

In 1949 the ILC selected the topic of State responsibility as one of its first 14 topics - selected from 22 suggested by Hersch Lauterpacht in a review for the ILC Secretariat - under its mandate to promote the progressive development and codification of international law. The topic was not new, having been selected for codification by the League of Nations. Work commenced in 1956 under the first Special Rapporteur, F.V. Garcia Amador, who began work in 1956, departing in 1961. In the next 40 years he was succeeded as Special Rapporteur by Roberto Ago (1963-1980), Willem Riphagen (1980-1986), Gaetano Arangio-Ruiz (1987-1995) and, finally, by James Crawford from 1997 to 2001. The Special Rapporteurs produced some 32 reports between them, and the ILC provisionally adopted 35 Articles making up Part One (origin of State responsibility) between 1969 and 1980, and 5 Articles from Part Two (content, forms and degrees of international responsibility) between 1980 and 1986. Between 1992 and 1996, the ILC Drafting Committee worked on the rest of Part Two and Part Three (settlement of disputes), making it possible for the ILC to adopt a text with commentaries in 1996 which it aimed to finalise by the end of 2001. Between 1997 and March 2001, James Crawford produced 4 reports on the Articles and the Drafting Committee completed a provisional second reading of the Draft Articles, taking into account Government comments, State practice and jurisprudence.

The work on State responsibility was finally completed in August 2001 when the ILC, after some forty years of work, adopted the Draft Articles on their second reading. The Articles were then submitted to the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly. The General Assembly subsequently adopted Resolution 56/83 (12 December 2001) which took note of the Articles and recommended them to the attention of Governments.

See further The International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility. Introduction, Text and Commentaries (2002), James Crawford, pp. 1-60.