ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an original contribution to scholarship by offering a comprehensive insight into the features that distinguish this particular layer of self-determination. It starts by introducing the sub-norm taken into account, and proceeds to outline the origins of self-determination as a legal principle, its meaning under the UN Charter and its association with decolonisation. The chapter examines the origins, development and conceptualisation under international law of what remains an under-explored and under-acknowledged dimension of self-determination. An in-depth analysis of the content and scope is thus provided, in defiance of the proverbial indefiniteness which is usually said to characterise the principle of self-determination. In Article 1 self-determination has both a political and an economic content and this content applies to all selves entitled to self-determination. It gives rights to peoples and imposes obligations to state parties to the Covenants, including obligations that touch upon states' decision-making arrangements at the constitutional level.
