Does the International Constitutional Legal System Provide for Adequate Means to Address Competing Claims to Self-Determination?

<Tab/>The concept of self-determination is closely identified with even the earliest thinking on liberalism and nationalism, it being the 'right or aspiration of a group, which considers itself to have a separate and distinct identity, to govern itself and to determine the political and legal status of the territory it occupies.' Implicit in both the US Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) was the notion that 'peoples' have a right to determine their own political destiny. It was however only at the end of the First World…