The Geneva Protocol — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Geneva Protocol
John Stuart Mill · en
This is laid down in the last paragraph of Article 10, which provides
that the Council shall "call upon" the Signatories to apply the
sanctions.[3] As the sanctions contemplated by the Protocol are _in
theory_ merely a development of the sanctions contemplated by Article
16 of the Covenant, it is interesting to note that this preliminary
calling by the Council upon the States to apply the sanctions
introduces a new system, at least a system which develops from the view
taken by the Assembly under Article 16 of the Covenant in 1921; for in
the elaborate resolutions then adopted,[4] it was stated, among other
things, that the Council was to give merely an "opinion" as to whether
there had been a breach of the Covenant by resort to war, but that it
was for each State to decide "for itself" whether or not its duty to
apply the sanctions provided by Article 16 of the Covenant had arisen.
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The reason for this development is easy to see. Even though the
sanctions of the Protocol may in theory be the same as those of Article
16 of the Covenant, _they are applicable to a very different state of
facts_. The sanctions of Article 16 of the Covenant were to be applied
to any Member of the League which resorted to war in disregard of
certain provisions of the Covenant in Articles 12, 13 and 15, and the
difficulty of determining whether or not, in a given case, a resort to
war _was_ a violation of those other Articles of the Covenant was not
solved, particularly as the Covenant does not preclude a resort to war
in _every_ case. Under the Protocol, however, every resort to war by
the parties to it is forbidden (except by way of defense or in aid of
defense or perhaps in execution of a judgment of some tribunal), and a
procedure which, in theory at least and probably in practice, would
always determine the aggressor, is provided. For if my view is
correct, an "aggressor" is a State which openly and wilfully defies the
other Signatories when summoned by the Council under Article 10 of the
Protocol. Consequently, it is now for the Council, upon the
determination of the aggressor, to call for the application of the
sanctions.