The Status of the International Legal Subject of the Republic of Belarus in the Conditions of Intergration (Yury Brovka)

Раздел - "Международное право", рубрика - "Вопросы теории""The Status of the International Legal Subject of the Republic of Belarus in the Conditions of Integration". Belarusian-Russian summit negotiations concluded in the end of 1998. The Presidents of the two countries signed a Joint Statement and the Declaration on further unification of Belarus and Russia. The leaders of the two states expressed "their determination to continue further stage-by-stage movement towards voluntary unification into a union state with the national sovereignity of the Union member-states retained". Both Presidents stressed that Belarus and Russia will remain "sovereign and full members of the international community of states, they retain all rights and obligations on international treaties the party to which they are". What is meant by "a union state" in this particular case? Proceeding from classical concepts, "a union state" is nothing but a federation. But in this case there is no question of preserving sovereignity and international legal subject status regarding two uniting states, neither there is a question of their remaining the full members of international community. In accordance with the traditional approach the federation member-states are not sovereign and do not have a right of voluntary secession. Typically, they are not "proper" international legal subjects. Only rarely the composite parts of some modern federations can show activity on the international scale which is limited by the scope of authority delegated by the federal centre. The only exception in the XX century from the above mentioned practice was connected with the activities of the Belarusian and Ukrainian SSR as parts of the USSR in the form of union republics. Along with the USSR these republics were the UN members which opened a wide range of possibilities for the membership in other international intergovernmental organizations and for the participation in the international treaties of universal nature. Besides, the originality of the USSR manifested itself also in the fact that its member-states were regarded to be sovereign and reserved a right of voluntary secession from the Union. However, the republics of the Union including the UN members (BSSR and USSR) while formally retaining such a high level of independence were in fact under severe pressure of the superstate structures of the USSR Communist Party. Not that any bodies of state administration and authorities were exempt from state pressure on the part of the CPSU. The author recognizes that it is impossible to reconstruct the unique formation of the USSR. He believes that there are neither objective nor subjective pre-requisites for the realization of this integration model. The author's view is that the next step in Belarusian-Russian integration should be completed by the establishing of the Confederative Union of states in which the members — the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation — will retain in full the sovereignity and status of the international legal subject, will remain the member-states of the UN and will retain without any exceptions the international treaty capacity. As for the international legal subject status of the Belarusian-Russian Federation, it may well correspond to the level of such international regional unions as the CIS, the EU, the Arab League etc