Written by Abdirahman Mohamed Haji
Recently, my attention was brought to a ‘legal memorial’published by wardheernews.com, which was purportedly written by unnamed ‘expert’ representingPeople’s Republic of China and submitted to the International Court of Justice(ICJ), requesting/ demanding from the Court to declare Somaliland as being an integral part of the Somalirepublic(http://wardheernews.com/Organizations/NSPU/ICJ%201-01-12.pdf). However, a cursory look at the ‘memorial’ by a trained eye would reveal it as faked documentby NSPU.
Ab initio, there is no record of the case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) archives. Second, the legal mistakes and errors in the purported memorial are too numerousfor a trained legal expert to draft it. Third, the person who wrote the fake document can only, perhaps, imagine what in the world would be at stake forthe Chinese state to go to a world Court for an internal issue in a failed state such as that of Somalia.With these points in mind, let us look at two other major deficiencies in the memorial, which will show the fake nature of the memorial.
A ) The address in the left hand corner of the ‘memorial’ and the reference to article 65 of the Statute of ICJ in part I indicate, one can assume, that the memorial was submitted by the Chinese state seeking an Advisory Opinion from ICJon the legal status of Somaliland. However, the author of the document should have known, alas, that Advisory Opinionscan only be requested bythe General Assembly, the Security Council and other organs and specialized agencies approved by the General Assembly (Article 96 , Chapter XIV,UN Charter),and not individual states per se.In light of this, the Chinese state lacks the legal standing to request an advisory opinion from ICJ, making the submission for an advisory opinion inadmissible ratione materiae under article 96 of the UN Charter.
b) In part IV, the last part, the memorial asks the Court to declare Somaliland as an integral part of the state Somali Republic [sic].
Even if we imagine in an unlikely situation where a state would be allowed to request an Advisory Opinion from the Court, it would not have requested the Court to declare/ determine a case in an Advisory Opinion. Advisory Opinionsareintended to offer legal advice on a given issue to the requesting institution,and not to determinecases. Only in contentious cases, where two or more state agree to submit a given dispute between/among them to the Court, do states normally ask the Court to declare/determine in support of one legal position or another espoused by the parties to the dispute. Thus, no lawyer in his right mind would have asked the court to determine a case in an Advisory Opinion, let alone a legal expert representing such a bigpower as China.
Part II of the document, the so-called facts of the case,is simply full of historical misrepresentations and half-truths which I do not need to engage them in here. The same is true about part II, the legal facts of the case, which marshals serious of unconnected jumble of legal arguments which would not simply stand in a court of law, let alone the ICJ.
Finally, the ‘Research Unit’ of the NSPU, if there is one, should have known better, and not tried to fake a legal document. Legal documents are no high school essays, nor can they be a figment of the imagination of someone with a laptop and internet access.
Abdirahman Mohamed Haji
Hargeisa, Somaliland.
| Email: abdirahman.mohamed@gmail.com |
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