SOVEREIGNTY UNDER SIEGE: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION, ACCOUNTABILITY NORMS, AND THE GRADUAL EROSION OF STATE IMMUNITY IN CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL LAW

The doctrine of sovereign immunity, once treated as an almost inviolable corollary of state equality under international law, has been subjected to sustained pressure from at least three directions over the past four decades. The first is the humanitarian intervention tradition, reconstituted in the early 2000s as the Responsibility to Protect, which premises the legitimacy of intervention on a state's compliance with minimum duties of care toward its own population. The second is the emergence of a body of peremptory norms, commonly described as jus cogens, whose hierarchically superior status in international law has been invoked by domestic courts to override the procedural shield of state immunity in civil proceedings for torture and war crimes. The third is the growth of international criminal jurisdiction, culminating in the Rome Statute's explicit rejection of official capacity as a ground for immunity before the International Criminal Court. This article examines each of these pressures in turn, drawing on the principal decisions of the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and domestic courts across multiple jurisdictions. The article concludes by identifying the principal lacunae in the current framework and offering proposals for a more principled resolution of the immunity-accountability conflict.