Page 126 - The Arabian Gulf States_Neat

64 THE LEGAL STATUS OF THE ARABIAN GULF STATES
protectorates’, lie continues, ‘possess no international status what­
soever.’1 And, according to Max Huber, a colonial protectorate ‘is
rather a form of internal organisation of a colonial territory on the
basis of autonomy for the natives'.2
The following may be regarded as a proper definition of protector­
ates of the international type:
A protectorate arises when a weak State surrenders itself by treaty to the
protection of a strong State in such a way that it transfers the management
of all its more important international affairs to the protecting State.
Through such a treaty an international union is called into existence between
the two Stales, and the relation between them is called protectorate. The
protecting State is internationally the superior of the protected State; the
latter has with the loss of the management of its more important inter­
national affairs lost its full sovereignty, and is henceforth only a half
sovereign State.3

The significance of Oppenheim's definition is that it draws attention
to the following facts: (a) that the protected State in the ‘international
union’ was, before the establishment of the protectorate, a sovereign
State; (b) that the basis of the union between the protected and the
protecting State was a formal treaty; (c) that the protected State did
not lose all its sovereignty and it thus remained, for some purposes of
international law, an international person.4 There are, indeed, many
other writers such as Westlake, Fenwick and Cavare, who concur in
the view that a protected State of the international type presupposes
that it was, before the establishment of the protectorate, a sovereign
State with full capacity to enter into treaty arrangements with other
sovereign States.5

1 Oppenheim, pp. 194-6.
2 Arbitral Award Concerning the Island of Palmas, A.J.I.L., 22 (1928), p. 898.
3 Oppenheim, p. 92. Professor Cavar6 defines a modern protectorate as a union
based on treaty arrangement, which imposes on the participants obligations of
political and economic nature: ‘C’cst un groupement d’allurc moderne, a la fois
► politique et juridique, constitud par deux Etats, le Protectcur et le Protegd qui tend
& assurer aux participants des advantages soit d’ordre politique, soit d’ordre
economique.’
It should be remarked, in this connection, that the writer who, in line with
other publicists, distinguishes between ‘Le Protcctorat du droit de gens, regi par
le Droit international’ and ‘Le Protcctorat colonial’, places the former Protec­
torates of Tunisia and Morocco in the first category. Sec Cavare, Louis, Le droit
international public posit if, vol. I (1951), pp. 424, 429-30.
4 See the decisions of the International Court below.
6 See Westlake, pp. 21-4. The writer distinguishes between protectorates over
States and protectorates over tribal communities. These which he calls ‘colonial
protectorates* are discussed by him at pp. 121-9; Fenwick, C. G., International Law
fl 924) P- 97. According to Fenwick ‘the protectorate is a state which has by formal
V *ty placed itself under the protection of a stronger state’; Cavare, op. cit.,
trea
pp. 424-34.