History
Diplomatic protection traces its roots to the eighteenth century. The idea that a state has a right to protect its subjects who are abroad has been expressed by Emmerich de Vattel in his opus "The Law of Nations": "Whoever ill-treats a citizen indirectly injures the State, which must protect that citizen." Since this protection could take any form whatsoever, the doctrine has often been misused by Western powers as a pretext to intervene in the affairs of less powerful nations, sometimes resorting to the use of force (for example in China during the Boxer Rebellion and Venezuela in the early twentieth century). As a result, the doctrine of diplomatic protection has attracted much criticism, particularly in former colonies. Specifically in Latin America the Calvo Doctrine was devised to avoid the invocation of diplomatic protection by Western nationals. Nevertheless, diplomatic protection has been recognised as customary international law by international courts and tribunals as well as scholars. After the Second World War, with the use of force being outlawed as an instrument of international relations, diplomatic protection usually takes other forms, such as judicial proceedings or economic pressure.
Read more about this topic: Diplomatic Protection
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)