ABSTRACT

What role do secessions play in our contemporary political world? This question could be perhaps narrowed to the following: why do people need new states? The resolutions and conventions of the UN General Assembly establishing the right of self-determination of peoples have perhaps already suggested an answer to this question. These resolutions indicate that it is no longer acceptable, within international law and customary practice, that one state, through its employees, rules over a geographically distant territory and people with whom they have little in common and whom they came to control by conquest and/or deception. By creating a new state, a subjugated people is freed from foreign rule and given a state in which they can now govern themselves. This need to liberate subjugated peoples from foreign rule has justifi ed the transformation of European overseas colonies into independent and sovereign states, a process which started in 1947 and has been mostly completed.