3. Self-Determination
Self-determination is a well-established principle of contemporary International Law. The practice of its exercising however is a political rather than legal process, indeed the UN Charter enshrining that same principle has no relevant list of nations/peoples appended, leaving open the key practical question: Who is entitled to self-determination and who is not? In each particular case, for self-determination to take place there should be a community of people considering themselves a distinct nation/people in the first place, then they must claim their right to self-determination and the opportunity to choose a selfdetermination option of their preference, and last but not least, that claim needs to be recognized by the respective central government.
More often than not this process goes not without obstacles and hardship; it suffices to mention the self-determination of the Kurdish, Palestinian, Timorese or Tibetan people. This has nothing to do with numerical strength as some people wrongly believe; indeed the Kurds number over 20 millions. At the same time the New Zealand possession of Tokelau, whose population is just half that of the Falklands, has its right to self-determination duly recognized both by New Zealand and the UN alike.
The Falkland Islanders are a nation same like the Scots, the Welsh or the English – or the people of Tokelau for that matter. Moreover, their right to self-determination has already been officially and formally recognized and guaranteed by the British Government through the process of enacting the 1985 Falklands Constitution. This act of transfer of prerogatives from London to Stanley entails that any future decisions regarding the sovereignty of the Falklands would be up to the Islanders alone to make, and this is irreversible. Once recognized/granted, the selfdetermination cannot be taken away.
Yet even the Falklands self-determination has been achieved not without the determined bold effort of the Falkland Islanders themselves, a turning point probably being their successful rejection and blocking of the attempted ‘lease back solution’ back in the Nineteen-seventies.
It must be pointed out that Falklands self-determination is an internal affair between the Falklands people on the one hand, represented by their elected government exercising sovereignty on
22
