64 Report of the International Law Commission on the work of its fifty-third session cases where the relevant obligation did not exist at the beginning of the course of conduct but came into being thereafter, the “first” of the actions or omissions of the series for the purposes of State responsibility will be the first occurring after the obligation came into existence. This need not prevent a court taking into account earlier actions or omissions for other purposes (e.g. in order to establish a factual basis for the later breaches or to provide evidence of intent). Chapter IV RESPONSIBILITY OF A STATE IN CONNECTION WITH THE ACT OF ANOTHER STATE Commentary (1) In accordance with the basic principles laid down in chapter I, each State is responsible for its own internationally wrongful conduct, i.e. for conduct attributable to it under chapter II which is in breach of an international obligation of that State in accordance with chapter III.261 The principle that State responsibility is specific to the State concerned underlies the present articles as a whole. It will be referred to as the principle of independent responsibility. It is appropriate since each State has its own range of international obligations and its own correlative responsibilities. (2) However, internationally wrongful conduct often results from the collaboration of several States rather than of one State acting alone.262 This may involve independent conduct by several States, each playing its own role in carrying out an internationally wrongful act. Or it may be that a number of States act through a common organ to commit a wrongful act.263 Internationally wrongful conduct can also arise out of situations where a State acts on behalf of another State in carrying out the conduct in question. (3) Various forms of collaborative conduct can coexist in the same case. For example, three States, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, together constituted the Administering Authority for the Trust Territory of Nauru. In the Certain Phosphate Lands in Nauru case, proceedings were commenced against Australia alone in respect of acts performed on the “joint behalf ” of the 261 See, in particular, article 2 and commentary. See M. L. Padelletti, Pluralità di Stati nel Fatto Illecito Internazionale (Milan, Giuffrè, 1990); Brownlie, System of the Law of Nations … (footnote 92 above), pp. 189–192; J. Quigley, “Complicity in international law: a new direction in the law of State responsibility”, BYBIL, 1986, vol. 57, p. 77; J. E. Noyes and B. D. Smith, “State responsibility and the principle of joint and several liability”, Yale Journal of International Law, vol. 13 (1988), p. 225; and B. Graefrath, “Complicity in the law of international responsibility”, Revue belge de droit international, vol. 29 (1996), p. 370. 263 In some cases, the act in question may be committed by the organs of an international organization. This raises issues of the international responsibility of international organizations which fall outside the scope of the present articles. See article 57 and commentary. 262 three States.264 The acts performed by Australia involved both “joint” conduct of several States and day-to-day administration of a territory by one State acting on behalf of other States as well as on its own behalf. By contrast, if the relevant organ of the acting State is merely “placed at the disposal” of the requesting State, in the sense provided for in article 6, only the requesting State is responsible for the act in question. (4) In certain circumstances the wrongfulness of a State’s conduct may depend on the independent action of another State. A State may engage in conduct in a situation where another State is involved and the conduct of the other State may be relevant or even decisive in assessing whether the first State has breached its own international obligations. For example, in the Soering case the European Court of Human Rights held that the proposed extradition of a person to a State not party to the European Convention on Human Rights where he was likely to suffer inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment involved a breach of article 3 of the Convention by the extraditing State.265 Alternatively, a State may be required by its own international obligations to prevent certain conduct by another State, or at least to prevent the harm that would flow from such conduct. Thus, the basis of responsibility in the Corfu Channel case266 was Albania’s failure to warn the United Kingdom of the presence of mines in Albanian waters which had been laid by a third State. Albania’s responsibility in the circumstances was original and not derived from the wrongfulness of the conduct of any other State. (5) In most cases of collaborative conduct by States, responsibility for the wrongful act will be determined according to the principle of independent responsibility referred to in paragraph (1) above. But there may be cases where conduct of the organ of one State, not acting as an organ or agent of another State, is nonetheless chargeable to the latter State, and this may be so even though the wrongfulness of the conduct lies, or at any rate primarily lies, in a breach of the international obligations of the former. Chapter IV of Part One defines these exceptional cases where it is appropriate that one State should assume responsibility for the internationally wrongful act of another. (6) Three situations are covered in chapter IV. Article 16 deals with cases where one State provides aid or assistance to another State with a view to assisting in the commission of a wrongful act by the latter. Article 17 deals with cases where one State is responsible for the internationally wrongful act of another State because it has exercised powers of direction and control over the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter. Article 18 deals with the extreme case where one State deliberately coerces another into committing an act which is, or but for 264 Certain Phosphate Lands in Nauru, Preliminary Objections (see footnote 230 above), p. 258, para. 47; see also the separate opinion of Judge Shahabuddeen, ibid., p. 284. 265 Soering v. the United Kingdom, Eur. Court H.R., Series A, No. 161, pp. 33–36, paras. 85–91 (1989). See also Cruz Varas and Others v. Sweden, ibid., No. 201, p. 28, paras. 69–70 (1991); and Vilvarajah and Others v. the United Kingdom, ibid., No. 215, p. 37, paras. 115–116 (1991). 266 Corfu Channel, Merits (see footnote 35 above), p. 22.