History of self-determination

Prior to World War I, international law did not concern itself with any discussion of self-determination for minority groups. Rather, once a group or a national movement succeeded in gaining independence from its mother state. 

After World War II, self-determination acquired the status of a legal right. However, the contours of that right were deeply embedded in the idea of decolonization self-determination meant that colonized peoples had the right to freely determine their political fate. Outside the decolonization paradigm, as will be discussed later, the existence of any general self-determination rights has been controversial. 

Charter marks an important turning point it signals the maturing of the political postulate of self-determination into a legal standard of behavior. Two decades later, the principle of self-determination was espoused in two additional treaties the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 1 of both of these Covenants provided that  

International law s deepening devotion to democracy remains what it has long been—a commitment above all to full participatory rights within established states. Emerging norms recognizing a right to self-government lend support to separatist claims principally when those same norms have aheady been profoundly, irrevocably breached. 

India expressed its view that the right of self-determination did not apply to sovereign and independent states because otherwise, the principle of self-determination would lead to fragmentation, disintegration and dismemberment of sovereign states. Thus, the negotiation record shows that numerous 

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