Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Peremptory norm
Summary
A peremptory norm (also called jus cogens) is a fundamental principle of international law that is accepted by the international community of states as a norm from which no derogation is permitted.
There is no universal agreement regarding precisely which norms are jus cogens nor how a norm reaches that status, but it is generally accepted that jus cogens bans genocide, maritime piracy, enslaving in general (i.e. slavery as well as slave trade), wars of aggression and territorial aggrandizement, torture, and refoulement. The latter two are evolving and controversial as they rest mainly on the definition of torture in regards to criminal sentencing. If sentencing is not cruel, inhuman or degrading but arbitrary or disproportionate convictions are imposed then a state's refoulement – where limited to the returning of unsubstantiated asylum claimants – may still be lawfully conducted to many such countries which are juridically developing, such as those lacking a clear separation of powers, with a relatively heightened risk of political persecution and reports of unfair trials.
Unlike ordinary customary law, which has traditionally required consent and allows the alteration of its obligations between states through treaties, peremptory norms may not be violated by any state "through international treaties or local or special customs or even general customary rules not endowed with the same normative force".
Discussions of the necessity of such norms could be traced back as far as 1758 (in Vattel's The Law of Nations) and 1764 (in Christian Wolff's Jus Gentium), clearly rooted in principles of natural law. But it was the judgments of the Permanent Court of International Justice that indicate the existence of such a peremptory norm, in the S.S. Wimbledon case in 1923, not mentioning peremptory norms explicitly but stating how state sovereignty is not inalienable.
Under Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, any treaty that conflicts with a peremptory norm is void.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.