Cyprus in International Law

Year 2013, Volume: 6 Issue: 1, 27 - 58, 01.01.2013

Erhan Bora

Abstract

The Cyprus issue is only a small item on the international law agenda but there is no other example in modern history of such a small piece of land with 135 UN Security Council resolutions about it, continuously affecting a geographical area at least 560 times larger than itself (the Middle East) and probably having an indirect impact on an area (the Eastern Mediterranean) even larger than that. However, the majority of the academic literature deals with the political aspects of the Cyprus issue and there are very few articles and/or essays that examine it as a case of international law, which is the main aim of this article. The article focuses on the events that caused Turkey to intervene in Cyprus in 1974 and the murder of the US Ambassador, examines the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the Loizidou case, and discusses the issues of sovereign state, recognition, ratione temporis, intervention and occupation whilst offering a critique of them.

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