Resumen de Human rights and self-determination of peoples versus secession
This paper is developed to address the need to clarify fundamental concepts of the international legal system regarding the principle of self-determination of peoples and its relationship to separation, secession, access to independence and other related concepts in displacements of sovereignty. The current historical moment is marked by the empty use of legal concepts in the sphere of public affairs. This use strips them of their role of promoting order, peace and the common good of the societies that they govern. Language has become a powerful weapon in the battle to retain power to benefit the exclusive interests of those who hold it; whoever controls the language will dominate the weak. In the issue at hand, this means blurring the objective concept of the self-determination of peoples in international law. The social consequences of this disfigurement can be seen in our common lands, in the Basque Country, in Catalonia, even as they spread across the rest of Spain, into Europe and, from there, to other continents, in a return to the 19th century, which, it should be recalled, preceded two barbaric world wars. This course will show that, based on rigorous application of the art of legal interpretation of international norms, the principle of self-determination of peoples is a specific international regime revolutionarily established by states in the 1960s to attribute the right to sovereignty and independence to colonies and occupied peoples. This concept is not comparable to secession, which is a form of territorial usurpation, something that is tacitly prohibited by states within the framework of the principle of self-determination itself. Nor is it comparable to the notion of territorial separation, a form of transfer of sovereignty (devolution) that a state may freely decide. Thus, secessionist movements in the international order cannot legally assert the objective notion of the principle (lex lata), because neither minorities nor any other part of a state’s population are holders of the right and because it does not include any right of separation (devolution) in cases of discrimination or gross and systematic violations of human rights (remedial secession). Anything else is simply an invented use of legal concepts (lex ad hoc inventa).
