The Friendly Relations Declaration of 1970 marks a most significant step in the development of international relations and international law, and it seeks to contribute to the progressive development and codification of fundamental principles in the sense of Article 13(1) UN Charter. The fact of its being adopted by consensus stressed its importance in the relations amongst Member States of the United Nations. The Declaration addresses seven fundamental principles that other participants in this volume have analysed and evaluated. It picks up principles derived from the text of the UN Charter itself, namely the prohibition of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, the principle of peaceful settlement of disputes, the duty not to intervene in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State, the duty of States to co-operate, the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, the principle of sovereign equality of States and the principle that States shall fulfil the obligations assumed by them in good faith. All these principles spell out in detail obligations derived from the UN Charter itself, yet surprisingly, no mention is made of human rights as a self-standing principle.

Alongside the prohibition of the use of force, self-determination constitutes the most important fundamental principle of contemporary international law. It can certainly be described as the most revolutionary of all existing fundamental principles. For the first time in the history of international law, one of its rules recognises the right of certain human communities, the ‘peoples’, to freely decide their international status, which includes the possibility of independence. In other words, the right to create their own State. Before the emergence of such a right, all struggles for independence were considered to be internal conflicts or civil wars, for which international law had little to say. They were merely envisaged as ‘domestic matters’.

The invitation to reconsider the principles of the Charter listed in the Friendly Relations Declaration obviously raises a fundamental question. Fifty years after their adoption, are these principles still valid or already obsolete in view of the radical changes affecting the political, technological, economic and social environment in which they had previously been reiterated? Here, we can see all the interest of the constitutionalist theses developed with regard to the Charter of the United Nations, despite the exaggerations to which they may have led. From this point of view, and even if the Charter can in no way be reduced to the content of the Declaration itself, the reconsideration of the latter already raises the question of whether the world should radically change its global political constitution. We can see that it is difficult to respond lightly in a positive way! On the contrary, everything points to a response on the basis of two proposals: on the one hand, the nature and scale of the problems facing not only the society of States but also humanity as a whole provides a strong encouragement to reaffirm the need to respect, in particular, the seven principles enshrined in the Declaration as well as in the Charter as a whole; on the other hand, we are no longer in 1970 and each of these principles must be completed and reinterpreted in the light of the new challenges facing the entire international community, which is composed not only of States but also of the different components of civil society.

Why did the legal principle of sovereign equality of States need a restatement in 1970? After all, it was not only expressly declared in the UN Charter (‘The Organization is based on the sovereign equality of its members’, Article 2(1)) but also deeply embedded in the conceptual structure of international law. One could say (and some have said) that the restatement was simply a redundancy. To be a ‘State’ was to possess sovereignty, and ‘sovereignty’ meant that one was not subordinated to another entity. All sovereigns would thus be equal in their non-subordination to each other. But whatever purists might say, the Friendly Relations Declaration was intended by its initiators neither as an exercise around the meaning or logic of the key concepts of the Charter nor as a formal celebration of their 25-year-old existence. It was instead part of the push by the decolonised world, the majority of the UN members that had not participated in the drafting of the Charter, to give its major provisions a meaning that would better include their objectives.

The main principles underlying the organisation of the global economy pre-date the Second World War, but mostly as ideas or policies, enshrined in domestic law, in international instruments of limited scope or in aborted attempts at designing far-reaching ones. The Second World War reset the approach to the global economy, either by taking such principles from a bilateral to a global level or by formulating new ones.

Co-operation is a cornerstone principle of contemporary international law. It is difficult to overstate its reach as it finds expression in many different areas of international legal relations. That said, its gravitation to the heart of international law has been a relatively recent phenomenon. The Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations of 1970 has played an important role in this transition.

In the Friendly Relations Declaration, the principle of peaceful settlement of international disputes is stipulated immediately after the principle relating to the prohibition of the threat or the use of force. This is evidently not a coincidence. As pointed out in the Report of the Special Committee in 1964, ‘the principle of peaceful settlement appear[s] as the logical corollary of the injunction to refrain from the threat or use of force’ and ‘[t]he history of international law and international relations show[s] that the two principles … developed side by side’.

The UN Charter was designed to institutionalise and project into the future the ‘Alliance of the Victorious Powers’ of the Second World War, as well as their vision of what the post-war world should be. Such vision harboured great potentialities for the future, but it was largely premised, consciously or unconsciously, on the image and presumed structures of the pre-existing world as reflected in classical international law. This heritage is clearly apparent in Article 2 of the Charter, which lays down the ‘principles’ of the United Nations.