Study Questions Of International Law That Prohibits The Use Of Force Principle

With two World Wars and the Cold War gone, people at the end of the twentieth century had been lost in the illusion that the world was in peace and harmony. The cruel reality, however, has forced them to realize that they are still confronted with the agony of war, so that the 21st-century world is far from "a halcyon land" as Shakespeare dreamed of. Actually, the Korea War, the Vietnam War, the Kosoval War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War, as well as plenty of bloody clashes, all of these point to the fact that war still looms large, threatening the international society and endangering human existence.The end of any legal system, national or international, is to safeguard the subjects of right under its control. How does the International Law prevent war by means of legal force? As the primary solution, the modern International Law prescribed that the use of force or threat by force is prohibited in the international relationship, i.e. Article 2(4) of UN Charter! This article serves as a stepping-stone to peace in the International Law, and as an Jus Cogens, it guarantees the international peace and security. However, Article 2(4) has been distorted, perverted, and abused in the past five decades. This dissertation is intended to explore Article 2(4) and its exceptions, thus playing an important role in explaining how to properly apply this article to the prohibition of force in theory and practice.This paper consists of three parts. The first part deals with the status of use of force in the International Law, and how the International Law has been implemented in the use of force or wars. The second part analyzes, from the viewpoint of legal theory, the rule of prohibiting force. It traces back to the historical development of using force in the International Law from legal to illegal position, focusing on Article 2 (4) 's status of customary international law and its nature of obligatory law. The analysis of this article is meant to corroborate the "principle of prohibition of use of force " .It contradict the death (or invalidity) of Article 2(4), and prove the unlawfulness of "prohibiting threat by force" from the legal and practicalperspectives. The main concern of the third part is the major exception toArticle 2(4) --self-defense. This part details the situations whenself-defense is applied, defines individual and communal self-defense, expounds the abuse of self-defense in the international practice and its unlawfulness, probes the relationship between communal security mechanism and self-defense, and differentiate self-defense from retaliation. Given the issue of applying self-defense to the present anti-terrorist war, it also explores the legal nature and characteristics of international terrorism; taking as examples the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, it then examines the dangerous trend caused by the magnification of using self-defense in the anti-terrorist military actions. Finally, this paper draws the conclusion that peaceful resolution of issues, quest for international cooperation, and disuse of war as the tool to promote national policies should be carried out under UN communal security mechanism and within UN framework, which lives up to not only the whole international society's expectation but also the hope of all peace-lovers in the world, as well as benefits human peace and security.Combining theory and practice, this paper draws considerably on the fundamentals of the International Law and adduces legal documents of the International Law and the International Court cases. This effort is made to study more than the theoretical side of the International Law, namely, new theories such as"Non-coutry's actors". It also makes an in-depth research on significant and complicated problems involved with the application of force to the international practice in recent years, e.g. interference in humanitarianism, preventive self-defense, and use of force in anti-terrorist military actions, etc. Unlike national laws which feature obligatory enforcement and stability, t...