Gli accordi fra governo e gruppi armati di opposizione nel diritto internazionale

The books aims at examining a widely neglected issue in legal literature: the legal status of the agreements between a government and an armed opposition group. To pursue this objective, the study preliminarily focuses on the notion of ‘treaty’ under international law and tries to identify the constitutive elements of a treaty. It then verifies whether those constitutive elements are present in the above agreements, that number in 340. The conclusion is that the vast majority of those agreements do not fall under the category of ‘treaty’ according to international law and are rather regulated by the national legal order. Only those agreements that concern international humanitarian law and the ceasefire as a pre-condition for the political settlement to the conflict do actually fulfill all the requirements of a ‘treaty’. Importantly, the book highlights the prominent role that international law plays also for those agreements that do not qualify as ‘treaties’ and that the study defines as ‘agreements under national law that are internationally guaranteed’. In this way, a new category of legal acts has been identified.