EU Report on the Georgia Conflict

It turns out that being a second-year law student means that you have no time to yourself. Ever. So I'm going to be very brief, and even sloppier than usual in treating the EU report on the 2008 Russian-Georgian Conflict. In doing so, I'm relying on the New York Times' version of the report, not having had time to read it myself.

There are two things, very briefly, that I'd like to note. First, I appreciated the report's noting the fact that Russia's distribution of passports to residents in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, beginning in 2005, was a blatant violation of international law, including the duty of non-intervention in internal affairs of other states under the UN Charter.

To distinguish the Abkhaz and Ossetian disputes from the often-bandied-about NATO intervention in Kosovo, there was no question of immediate threat to the civilian population from an aggressor state when Russia took its action. What is more, any threat that did exist was due to the breakaway regimes' intransigence and unwillingness to deal with what at the time were fairly reasonable policies emanating from Tbilisi. Further, this very intransigence was due much in part to Russia's persistent willingness to step in and support the breakaway regimes, dating back to the original conflicts of the late 1980s and early 1990s. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, any such unilateral intervention in an internal conflict would also have been in itself a violation of international law. Simply put, there is no legal basis for the Russian claim.

Second, I was interested to see that the report, at least according to the Times, blamed Georgia for initiating the hostilities by firing on Russian peacekeepers in Tskhinvali. This isn't a version of events I had heard before (the peacekeepers part, not the firing-on-Tskhinvali part), so I'll be interested to see what the back-story is to this when I take an actual read through the report.

I guess my larger point here is that, while the actions of both sides have been deplorable, Russia's breaches of international law, and more importantly the international community's near acquiescence to them, raise serious questions about many fundamental international legal issues, including the duty of non-intervention and the right to self-determination of a territory. The EU's report notwithstanding, it is disturbing to me to see such a lack of interest from the international community.