Summaries of Judgments, Advisory Opinions and Orders of the International Court of Justice
also a human tragedy marked by the massive infliction of death, serious injuries of all sorts, and dreadful suffering of the population.
7. The Court should not, in his view, have limited itself, as it did in the present Advisory Opinion, to select only the few reported and instantaneous facts of the circumstances surrounding the declaration of independence by Kosovo's authorities on 17.02.2008 and shortly afterwards, making abstraction of its factual background. He regrets that this factual background has been to a great extent eluded by the Court, apparently satisfied to concentrate on the events of 2008-2009, and only briefly and elliptically referring to the crisis in Kosovo, without any explanation of what it consisted of.
8. Yet, – Judge Cançado Trindade adds, – that grave humanitarian crisis, as it developed in Kosovo along the nineties, was marked by a prolonged pattern of successive crimes against civilians, by grave violations of International Humanitarian Law and of International Human Rights Law, and by the emergence of one of the most heinous crimes of our times, that of ethnic cleansing. The deprivation of Kosovo's autonomy (previously secured by the Constitution of 1974) in 1989, paved the way for the cycle of systematic discrimination, utmost violence and atrocities which, for one decade (19891999), victimized large segments of the population of Kosovo, leading to the adoption of a series of resolutions by the main political organs of the United Nations, and culminating in the adoption of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999), and, one decade later, in Kosovo's declaration of independence.
9. Judge Cançado Trindade considers it necessary to insert the matter at issue into the larger framework of the Law of the United Nations. To that end, he starts (in Part IV of his separate opinion) by recalling pertinent antecedents linked to the advent of international organizations, in their growing attention to the needs and aspirations of the "people" or the "population" (in the mandates system under the League of Nations, in the trusteeship system under the United Nations, and in contemporary United Nations experiments of international territorial administration). Such experiments, in Judge Cançado Trindade's perception, show that international organizations have contributed to a return to the droit des gens, and to a revival of its humanist vision, faithful to the teachings of the "founding fathers" of the law of nations.
10. That vision marked its presence in past experiments of the mandates system, under the League of Nations, and of the trusteeship system, under the United Nations, as it does today in the United Nations initiatives of international administration of territory. In Judge Cançado Trindade's reassessment, the recurring element of the due care with the conditions of living of the "people" or the "population" provides the common denominator, in an inter-temporal dimension, of the experiments of mandates, trust territories and contemporary international administration of territories. Those juridical institutions, – each one a product of its time, – were conceived and established, ultimately, to address, and respond to, the needs (including of protection) and aspirations of peoples, of human beings.
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