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The Opinions of the Badinter Arbitration Committee: A Second Breath for the Self-Determination of Peoples
The Question of Frontiers
Another source of merit in this type of solution is to be found in the disassociation of the concept of nationality from that of `territory'.
As they are given the right of self-determination, individuals may demand and obtain their recognition as being part of a group of persons of their choice. This would be done through precise mechanisms, bringing with them guarantees, which have to be negotiated and settled at international level. This would not, however, have any effect upon the territories of those States concerned. Frontiers would remain unchanged.
The Arbitration Committee laid great emphasis upon the fundamental importance which it attached to the principle of respect for frontiers existing at the moment of independence (uti possidetis juris). This point was not only made in its Opinion No. 3 but was also evoked in Opinion No. 2 when it recalled that, whatever the circumstances, `the right to self-determination must not involve changes to existing frontiers'.
The territorial integrity of States, this great principle of peace, indispensable to international stability, which as noted by the Committee and the International Court of Justice,4 was invented in Latin America to deal with the problems of decolonialization, and then further applied in Africa has today acquired the character of a universal, and peremptory norm. The people of former colonial countries were wise to apply it; Europeans must not commit the folly of dispensing with it.
For all that the principle is not as rigid as some might feel it ought to be. Stability does not mean intangibility. Although States are prohibited from acquiring a territory by force, they might freely decide, as the Committee made clear, to a modification of their frontiers `by agreement'. This was acknowledged by the Croatian Foreign Minister in an interview given to a French newspaper,5 where he stated that he did not exclude the possibility of `slight modifications' in existing frontiers. However, such an agreement cannot be imposed by one of the parties as pre-requisite for a peace settlement: a rectification of this type could only result from negotiations between willing States.
4 In the case concerning the Frontier Dispute between Burkina Faso and Mali, Judgment of 22 December 1986, ICJ Reports (1986) 3.
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