"Responsibility is the corollary of international law, the best proof of its
existence and most credible measure of its effectiveness. Every legal system
allocates responsibility. Norms, or secondary rules, operate to hold a person
accountable for contravening a primary legal obligation."
35.
It is also the rule of law going also by the opinion above that a primary rule
in domestic law or the Community law is the obligation not to interfere with
another's property as in Article 14 of the said African Charter. As the said writer
puts it, "whether the interference is attributable to a particular person and, if so,
what remedies the victim can seek are determined by the secondary rules." He
also said, 'State Responsibility for international wrongful acts follows the same
logic'. Consequently we hold that secondary rules in international law are no
different from primary rules in that they must be shown to derive from a treaty,
custom or general principles and secondary rules are the rights and obligations that
apply after a primary rule has been violated. In our view, by the Articles on
Responsibility of States for internationally Wrongful Acts, with Commentaries
(2001) Report of the ILC, 53R 0 session (2001) 11(2) Yearbook of the ILC 26, UN.
Doc. A/56/10(2001) (ILC Articles), is not out of place herein.
36.
Sometimes, it has been suggested that this principle needs to be qualified, to
exclude from State responsibility unlawful conduct by very low-ranking public
officials but it was stated that this cannot be right and we reject the statement, in
the way that it has always been rejected by its exclusion in cases applied by
international human rights court and state that it matters not what type of organ of
State is concerned, or what internal function it performs, nor whether it holds a
superior or subordinate position in the organization of the State. We also state that
in respect of the conduct of persons acting on behalf of the State it matters not
whether the persons hold superior or subordinate position, the fact that attribution
of their conduct to the State is cast in general terms leads one to the same
conclusion.
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