ABSTRACT
The state has a right to exist – the International Court of Justice saw this as a core principle of international law in its Nuclear Weapons advisory opinion, a norm that constitutes the basis of the international legal right to self-defence. This is not to say that a government has a right to exist. Rather the right of a government to exist derives from the principle of the self-determination of peoples (Zwitter 2012a). Accordingly, peoples have the choice to choose their government and its form. That the international community saw it similarly can be seen in the preambular paragraph of the res. 1973 (2011) concerning Libya (which was used by NATO to justify what eventually became a regime change): ‘Reaffirming its strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’. It is these principles of international law (sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity) that form the international legal basis of the state of emergency.
