Secession and referendum : a new dimension of international law on territorial changes?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PhD Thesis in Iternational Law. The aim of the present research is to focus on current developments on territorial changes in international law. The study inquiries about whether according to international law, the referendum is a sufficient or a necessary condition for secession, or both. For this purpose, an empirical approach is adopted, focusing on the cases of, inter alia, Quebec, Montenegro, Crimea, Scotland and Catalonia. The thesis is divided into four main parts: firstly (1) it examines the relationship between self-determination and secession, then, (2) it discusses the approach of international law towards secession and develops a proposal for disentangling secession from self-determination. In the third part, (3) the research focuses on the role of territorial referendum in international law on territorial changes. The study finds that there is no sufficient practice and opinio juris to support the existence of an international rule according to which the referendum is a sufficient element to legitimize the birth of a new entity through secession. Neither there is an international obligation to hold a referendum to secede. Nevertheless, for the latter, the thesis finds at least some elements to support the view that more and more the referendum is becoming a necessary element in the process for secession, provided that it takes place in combination with the fulfillment of other conditions. Among these conditions, on the one side the study suggests that the referendum might trigger an obligation upon the parties to negotiate a new territorial assessment. On the other side, the referendum has to comply with certain procedural standards derived from international documents; case law and practice of the Council of Europe. Hence, the study is concluded with a (4) focus on the international procedural requirements for territorial referenda and on international reactions to the conduct of referenda in compliance with, or in violation of, the procedural standards above mentioned.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".