@article{2025:schilling:on_the_con,
title = {On the Continuity of Submerged Island States},
year = {2025},
note = {An island State whose territory has become submerged has thereby,
according to an austere view, become extinguished. This may well lead
to its people becoming stateless. To refute the austere view and thus
to avoid this result requires to argue for the submerged State’s
continuity. An ILC Study Group has developed a number of possible
arguments therefor. The most persuasive of them is the “Maintenance
of international legal personality without a territory”. However,
the reasoning the Group has provided is rather elliptic. An intriguing
approach to buttressing its argument is to look for a legal theory
which defines the State with reference not to its territory but rather
to its law and its population. Such a theory has been developed by
Felix Somló. Once adapted to a situation in which the government and
(parts of) the population of a submerged State function and live on
the territory, and with the consent, of a host State, it allows to
consider the entity constituted in this way as a peripheral case of
the “State”. While international law is free to recognise such an
entity as a State, it ought to do so for a number of reasons, first
among them the normative one to shield the submerged State’s people
from statelessness.},
journal = {VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee},
pages = {214--238},
author = {Schilling, Theodor},
volume = {58},
number = {2}
}