Montevideo Convention

The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States\nwas a treaty signed at Montevideo on December 26, 1933, at the\nSeventh International Conference of American States. At this conference, President Franklin Roosevelt and United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared American opposition to armed intervention in inter-American affairs, attempting to reverse the perception of Yankee imperialism, the so-called Good Neighbor Policy. The convention was signed by 19 states, 3 with reservations. The Montevideo is a regional American convention; but the principles contained in article 1, that sets out the criteria for statehood, have sometimes been recognized as an accurate statement of customary international law:

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

The remaining articles set out various rights and duties of states. The first sentence of article 3, however, explicitly states that "The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states." This has been used by less-recognized entities like the Republic of China or even entirely non-recognized entities like the Principality of Sealand to argue for their status as states. Some have questioned whether these criteria are sufficient. According to the constitutive theory of statehood, a state exists only insofar as it is recognized by other states. As this would narrow down the state concept from that of the Montevideo Convention, there has also been attempts to further broaden it, although they have gained less support. Founders of non-territorial micronations commonly assert that the requirement in the Montevideo Convention of a defined territory is in some way wrong-headed, for largely unspecified reasons. Some non-territorial entities, notably the Sovereign Order of Malta, are indeed considered subjects of international law, but these do not aspire to statehood.

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\n* Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States