Killing It Softly: The ILC’S Articles on State Responsibility

Abstract By preferring tautologies supplied by the theory of objective responsibility over general principles of liability derived from comparative law, the ILC’s Articles on State Responsibility cannot assist in operationalising the general and opentextured treaty standards for State conduct that are commonplace in many fields of international law, particularly in environmental law. Moreover, the one-size-fits-all approach to defining the secondary consequences of a wrongful act in the ILC’s Articles rests upon a conception of outright prohibition of the conduct in question and a community interest in securing the cessation of that conduct, whereas many primary obligations, if transgressed, should be properly seen as generating a duty of compensation only without the other secondary consequences that automatically follow in the ILC’s scheme of responsibility.