DEROGATIONS UNDERTAKEN BY SYRIA DURING ITS STATE OF EMERGENCY

Abstract

Different sovereign states are subject to different legal obligations, and these legal obligations in the form of provisions, are contained in various treaties. In this paper, the author in particular, is concerned about certain provisions of one such treaty – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), whose Art. 4 governs state obligations, during a state of emergency.

ICCPR is a multilateral treaty, which protects people’s civil and political rights. It is popularly known as the primus inter pares (most significant) of the universal international human rights treaties. Many of the rights contained in ICCPR are subject to either limitations or derogations. Limitations are based on the idea that, when state parties respond to a situation of emergency, they must try to limit the scope of enforcement of specific rights instead of directly trying to derogate from them, because derogations are complete or partial elimination of international obligations on the part of state parties. But that being said, ICCPR does allow states, to derogate from some of its obligations when there is a threat to the life of the nation, by undertaking certain measures, which are not inconsistent with their other obligations contained in international law at large and which do not involve discrimination solely on the basis of colour, race, sex, language, religion or social origin. That being established, the subject of our study in this paper is the derogations undertaken by the Syrian Arab Republic AKA Syria, which is one of the countries having the longest continuous state of emergency.