Legal Obligations Not To Conclude Separate Peace
It is customary in cases of war waged by several allies to conclude agreement or declaration by all belligerents on the same side not to conclude a separate peace with the opposing camp. Such was the case during the First World War and Second World War.
A declaration to that effect was issued on September 5, 1914 by the British, French and Russian governments, which briefly stated that
"The British, French, and Russian Governments mutually engage not to conclude peace separately during the present war. The three Governments agree that when terms of peace come to be discussed, no one of the allies will demand conditions of peace without the previous agreement of each of the other allies".
The Japanese government acceded to this declaration on October 19, 1915.
On November 30, 1915, the same four governments, now joined by the Italian government, have issued a similar joint declaration regarding avoiding separate peace.
The obligation to refrain from separate peace was also made during the Second World War in both camps. The Tripartite Pact between the German, Italian and Japanese governments committed the three to prosecute the war together. On the Allied camp, that obligation was contained in the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942.
A similar obligation arose within the Arab League in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict not to reach any separate peace treaty with the Israeli government, in order to assure that a collective arrangement would take into consideration the interests of all Arab states plus the Palestinians. The Egyptian government under Anwar Sadat acted in contrast to that rule when decided to conclude a separate peace treaty in 1979.
Read more about this topic: Separate Peace
Famous quotes containing the words separate peace, legal, obligations, conclude, separate and/or peace:
“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the Good Neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“That, upon the whole, we may conclude that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrification of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion’s little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.”
—Caroline Lejeune (1897–1973)
“For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.”
—Christopher Smart (1722–1771)