Page 306 - The Arabian Gulf States_Neat

244 THE LEGAL STATUS OF THE
ARABIAN GULF STATES
Muscat, then, presumably, it is open to modification by the Sultan;
and there can, in technical terms, be no question of a breach.
The only remaining possibility is that the agreement is governed by
some third system of law which binds both the Sultan and the Omanis.
If any such system exists, it must be a local system, presumably
derived from the custom and practice of the area. That such a system
may exist cannot be denied a priori. On the other hand, if it is to be
established, there must be some evidence of it; and there appears to
be none. This being so, it is difficult to speak, with any confidence,
of a breach in a technical legal sense of the treaty of Sib. Questions
of the Sultan's honour or moral obligations arc prima facie outside
the concern of the lawyer.
Nevertheless, if the assumption is made that the Sultan was acting
in the breach of the treaty in 1937, two questions then arise. The first
is whether that violation by itself terminated the treaty in 1937. The
second is whether, assuming the treaty to have subsisted, the 1937
breach could have been used in 1955 or in 1957, to justify the Omani
revolt.
To both these questions it is submitted that the answer is in the
negative. Apparently no allegation was made in 1937 by the Omanis
that the treaty had been violated, or, if violated, that they were
entitled to regard it as at an end. Indeed all the evidence points in the
direction of the continuation of the treaty after that date. And if the
treaty subsisted it seems contrary to the general principles of the law
of contract, even when most broadly interpreted, to suggest that one
party may assert a breach of the agreement by the other party as a
justification for reprisal action taken eighteen years after the alleged
breach. On the other hand, if, as is claimed by the Omanis, the viola­
tion of the agreement occurred in December 1955 when the Sultan,
provocatively, conducted his military expedition to the interior
against the legal authority of the Imam, then there would, probably, be
a point in justifying the Omani revolt as an unavoidable reprisal action.
Nature of British obligations to the Sultan: legality of British armed
intervention in Oman
Having examined the merits of the Omani-Muscati dispute as to
sovereignty over Oman, it may be desirable to consider a relevant
issue which overshadowed this dispute when it arose on the inter­
national plane in 1957, namely, British military action in Oman in
July 1957. Is there any legal basis for the British Government to take
military action in Oman at the request of the Sultan?
This is one of the complex legal issues in the Omani-Muscati dispute,
and public opinion in Britain was at the time divided on the
legality of British intervention in a purely domestic dispute between
the Sultan and the Imam. In the United Nations, eleven Arab States,