The duty to repair in practice: The hundred years history of a legal concept

We Owe You Nothing

“…552, 559) supported the idea of a global settlement that would not only be based on the assessment of the value of nationalized properties by the decolonizing nation but also on the comprehensive calculus of past benefits realized by private interests and chartered companies in the colonies, especially if the latter was not reemployed for the good of the colonial subjects from whom profit was extracted. Thus, only if reparations were to be calculated based on a long-term view of the historical relations between metropolis and colonial territories was Bedjaoui in favour of talking about reparationsand then, his thinking converged with solidarists' defence of the 'duty to repair' (Colonomos & Mallard, 2016). In many ways, these global settlements were exactly what Bedjaoui (1978b, p. 31) wanted the ILC to promote, as he inscribed within the article on state succession in respect to property for newly independent states a clause which mirrored the kind of settlement that the former colony had to find with the metropolis: the clause introduced 'the concept of the contribution of the dependent territory to the creation of certain movable property of the predecessor state .…”