Municipal law

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Domestic law is an international law term used to denote the national, domestic, or internal law of a sovereign state.

Domestic law includes not only law at the national level, but law at the state, provincial, territorial, regional or local levels.

While, as far as the law of the state is concerned, these are distinct categories of law, international law is largely uninterested in this distinction and will treat them all as one.

Similarly, but also includes not only the ordinary law of the state, but also its constitutional law. Again, in most cases, international law will not consider the constitutional law of the state in any way special, even though internally the state does.

This principle, of avoiding making distinctions in municipal law, can cause conflicts, especially in the case of federal states or states with written constitutions and powerful independent courts.

Such states (the United States in particular) have at times attempted to argue that they should be excused from international legal obligations on the grounds that their constitutions do not permit them to fulfill them, or that the fulfillment of them is the responsibility of the states not the federal government.

However, other states oppose these arguments, since if accepted they feel that almost any rule of international law could be avoiding simply by arguing that municipal law does not allow it.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides that, if a treaty violates a state's constitution, it is still binds the state, unless the violation was manifestly obvious to the other states at the time of the treaties' conclusion.

Thus, if a treaty violates a state's constitution, the state is still obliged to obey it under international law -- they have an international legal obligation either to disregard their constitutional law in favour of international law...

Or to amend their constitution to enable the international legal obligation to be fulfilled -- which path is taken is an internal decision for the state concerned.