Suspended Sovereignty and Foreign Occupation

The cognition of “suspension of sovereignty” is not recent in the legal and political dissertations in international affiliations. It has been applied chiefly to elucidate exciting, dramatic and extreme circumstances in which an understandable outbreak is recognized between the legal suggestion of internal sovereignty and the social and political realities. A conspicuous instance has been the case of foreign occupation.

Suspended sovereignty has raised new outlooks about its function and role in international politics. It is the result of international developments defining an evolution of international political power. Thus, the likely future formation of such a concept in international law should be seen and investigated more as a favorable circumstance to advance the clarity and responsibility of international changeable legislations; and less as a chance to reinstitute hierarchical relations in international politics.
Suspended Sovereignty describes legal and political international situations in which the internal aspect of sovereignty was seen as an empty legal suggestion not corresponding with social realities. The matching claim has mainly been that in such situations sovereignty is no longer an applicable legal concept. Such cases include foreign occupation, the Mandate and UN Trusteeship systems and cases in which states or territories were placed under interim international administrations either as the result of international agreements or due to UN Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter V ii of the UN Charter.

Most usually the concept of suspended sovereignty is affiliated with cases of foreign occupation. Under newfangled international law, foreign encroachment does not lead to the annihilation of a state. However, a state under profession is incompetent to accomplish governmental power in its domain. States have historically had diminutive problem in identifying that the application of sovereign rights may be transiently delayed due to war or foreign occupation, as the occurrence of the Second World War most prominently illustrates. The implicative assumption behind this attitude has been that, with peace, sovereignty will be rebuilt through a final decision.

At present the position of international law is that while illegal seizing of power (as a result of foreign invasion), will not terminate a State, it will, however, accommodate its occurrence of statehood within a part or the whole or its own domain. While the legal personality of the state under occupation is not invalidated, its sovereign rights are suspended. In this sense, the legal continuity of statehood is limited. This means that the illegal dictator or power during the period or occupation effectively replaces the legal sovereign in international legal relations, at least with respect to the legal responsibility of sovereignty such as state responsibility or other contractual obligations it may assume in connection with its activities as the real sovereign.


Lastly, it appears that the legal rule of suspended sovereignty serves the intention of adjusting law with reality in expectation of a final decision. In this sense, it primarily aids as a legal account of a political reality that has created an aberrant legal status. The concept of suspended sovereignty also implies the effort of the international legal system to guarantee both, the rule of law and the determination of international legal relations in the case of suspension of internal sovereignty due to illegal foreign occupation.