WAS RUSSIA’S SO-CALLED ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA ILLEGAL???

At a speech today in Brussels, President Obama said Russia's annexation of Crimea must be met with condemnation, "not because we're trying to keep Russia down, but because the principles that have meant so much to Europe and the world must be upheld."

The Crimean peninsula was controlled by the Russian Empire from the 18th to 20th centuries until it became part of an independent Ukraine following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even to the most astute observer, the current crisis in the southeastern region of Ukraine is difficult to interpret. The view can be blurred by geographic distance, muddled by inconsistent reporting and blinded by prejudice. Because of treacherously unremitting digital and social media, an understanding of the complex socio political elements is diluted; independent inquiry loses legitimacy and critical voices enter an anarchic fray.

Crimea was added to the Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party. Both of these Russian areas have been part of Russia for longer than the United States has existed. It didn't make a difference at the time because it was all part of the Soviet Union.

The population in Crimea is predominantly Russian, and so is eastern Ukraine. These people said, "We don't want anything to do with this government in Kiev, which is banning our language and destroying our war monuments and threatening us in many ways." They followed the same legal steps; the same UN procedures, the same international court procedures. So everything that has occurred is strictly legal.
“Self-determination – characterized by the International Court of Justice as “the need to pay regard to the freely expressed will of peoples” – is unquestionably a self-evident truth based on, and consistent with, basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. It can be understood in terms of four aspects: principle, right, process and outcome.

Principle: The principle of self-determination as applied to a people began to be formalized in 1919 after the League of Nations - precursor to the United Nations - was established. Simply stated, it is the proposition that a people should be able to freely choose its own system of politics and its own form of economic, cultural and social development.

Right: During the years following the United Nations’ founding in 1945, the principle evolved into a right under international law and even jus coigns – a peremptory norm - and was codified in various United Nations declarations and international covenants.

The right to self-determination is essentially a process right rather than a right to a pre-defined outcome. It does not dictate a particular process or a particular outcome. The exercise of the right entails a process of dialogue between the participants on equal terms and an outcome that is consented to by the people.

Process: The self-determination process can take many forms including direct negotiation by representatives of the participants, meditation via a trusted third party, the findings of an agreed-upon independent tribunal, or the ruling of a recognized international court. The process ends with the people's consent to a proposed outcome through a referendum, plebiscite or some other means.

Outcome: The outcome of self-determination could be independence, genuine autonomy, federation, devolution of power (regional self-government), voluntary integration within a state, or some other acceptable political status. It may also involve different resolutions for different areas such as the economic, cultural and social spheres.

"All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." Article 1, ICESCR treaty

The right to self-determination of peoples is also recognized in many other international and regional instruments, and by leading international jurists.

All peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. The right to self-determination is recognized in international law as a right of process (not of outcome) belonging to peoples and not to states or governments. The preferred outcome of an exercise of the right to self-determination varies greatly among the members of the UNPO. For some, the only acceptable outcome is full political independence. This is particularly true of occupied or colonized nations. For others, the goal is a degree of political, cultural and economic autonomy, sometimes in the form of a federal relationship. For others yet, the right to live on and manage a people's traditional lands free of external interference and incursion is the essential aim of a struggle for self-determination.

Self-determination in International Law: The principle of self-determination is prominently embodied in Article I of the Charter of the United Nations. Earlier it was explicitly embraced by US President Woodrow Wilson, by Lenin and others, and became the guiding principle for the reconstruction of Europe following World War I. The principle was incorporated into the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the Dumbarton Oaks proposals which evolved into the United Nations Charter. Its inclusion in the UN Charter marks the universal recognition of the principle as fundamental to the maintenance of friendly relations and peace among states. It is recognized as a right of all peoples in the first article common to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which both entered into force in 1976.

1.  Paragraph 1 of this Article provides: All peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. The right to self-determination of peoples is recognized in many other international and regional instruments, including the Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States adopted b the UN General Assembly in 1970,
2. the Helsinki Final Act adopted by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975,
3. the African Charter of Human and Peoples' Rights of 1981,
4. the CSCE Charter of Paris for a New Europe adopted in 1990,
5. the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of 1993.
6. It has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice in the Namibia case  7, the Western Sahara case 8, and the East Timor case 9, in which its erga omnes character was confirmed.
7. Furthermore, the scope and content of the right to self-determination has been elaborated upon by the UN Human Rights Committee 10, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 11, and numerous leading international jurists

That the right to self-determination is part of so called hard law has been affirmed also by the International Meeting of Experts for the Elucidation of the Concepts of Rights of Peoples brought together by UNESCO from 1985 to 1991, 12, it came to the conclusion that (1) peoples' rights are recognized in international law; (2) the list of such rights is not very clear, but also that (3) hard law does in any event include the right to self-determination and the right to existence, in the sense of the Genocide Convention. The inclusion of the right to self-determination in the International Covenants on Human Rights and in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, referred to above, emphasizes that self-determination is an integral part of human rights law which has a universal application. At the same time, it is recognized that compliance with the right of self-determination is a fundamental condition for the enjoyment of other human rights and fundamental freedoms, be they civil, political, economic, social or cultural. The concept of self-determination is a very powerful one. As Wolfgang Danspeckgruber put it: "No other concept is as powerful, visceral, emotional, unruly, as steep in creating aspirations and hopes as self-determination." It evokes emotions, expectations and fears which often lead to conflict and bloodshed. Some experts argued that the title holders should be or are limited in international law. Others believed in the need to limit the possible outcome for all or categories of title holders. Ultimately, the best approach is to view the right to self-determination in its broad sense, as a process providing a wide range of possible outcomes dependent on the situations, needs, interests and conditions of concerned parties. The principle and fundamental right to self-determination of all peoples is firmly established in international law.

While there is no universally accepted definition of a "people" in international law, international bodies and scholars have developed criteria for identifying the holders of the right to self-determination. A generally accepted description was developed in 1989 by the UNESCO International Meeting of Experts on Further Study of the Concept of the Rights of Peoples. This description identifies a people as a group of individual human beings who enjoy some or all of the following common features:

1. a common historical tradition (Crimean case)
2. racial or ethnic identity (Crimean case)
3. cultural homogeneity (Crimean case)
4. linguistic unity (Crimean case)
5. religious or ideological affinity (Crimean case)
6. territorial connection (Crimean case)
7. common economic life (Crimean case)

The UNESCO description further states that "the group as a whole must have the will to be identified as a people or the consciousness of being a people" and that the group may have institutions or other means of expressing its common characteristics and will for identity. Thus, the notion of a “people” combines objective characteristics describing a group's common historical, ethnic, cultural, religious or other background, with the subjective component of a common awareness as a people.

In international practice, an external and internal right of self-determination is sometimes distinguished. The external right includes the right of secession, while the internal right is concerned with a people's right of self-governance within a sovereign state. Most sovereign states do not recognize the right to self-determination through secession in their constitutions.

So the Parliament in Crimea followed these procedures and has now declared Crimea to be independent. The vote that [was] given to the people on [March 16] . ... So there has been no Russian invasion. That's easily provable. The Russian troops in the Ukraine have been there since the 1990s. And there has been no Annexation, but a return to the homeland.