Ever wonder what Great Britain can really do when they suspect a foreign power of aggression on their own soil, such as the recent poisoning incident? Lawfare‘s Ashley Deeks gets the details:
The press has reported on (non-forcible) reactions that the U.K. may be considering. This reporting tends to focus on imposing economic sanctions; expelling Russian spies or diplomats from the U.K.; restricting visas to Russian businesspeople; or revoking the broadcast license for RT, Russia’s national media network. These measures would be “retorsions,” or unfriendly acts that do not violate international law.
The U.K. still has another category of options: countermeasures. The Draft Articles on State Responsibility, adopted by the International Law Commission and generally accepted as an accurate restatement of customary international law, define countermeasures as acts by the injured state that would otherwise be international law violations but that are not wrongful because they are responses to an initial violation of international law by the wrongdoing state. Countermeasures should be proportional to the original violation, and their goal must be to induce the wrongdoing state to comply with its international obligations and cease the violative behavior. The victim state must cease its countermeasures once the violation ceases. Only states that are injured may impose countermeasures: This means that a victim state’s allies may not impose “collective countermeasures” on the wrongdoing state if only the victim state was actually injured. And, according to the Draft Articles, before imposing countermeasures the injured state must call on the wrongdoing state to fulfill its obligations, notify the wrongdoing state that it intends to take countermeasures, and offer to negotiate with that state.
Not the sorts of things that’ll make Putin’s hair stand on end, but then he has little enough as it is.
