Countermeasures in International Law; Five Salient Cases discusses one of the most controversial issues in the ILC Draft on State Responsibility: the concept of countermeasures. Envisaged as a `simple' `circumstance precluding wrongfulness' by Ago. it became a subject of serious controversies in both the International Law Commission as well as in the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly of the UN.

The proposed limitations by Special Rapporteur Arangio-Ruiz on the `right' to take countermeasures signaled a legal development, which was far to progressive in the opinion of many commentators and states.

This publication critically analysis the discourse on countermeasures, taking the subsequent ILC reports and discussions as its basic point of reference.

In addition to an analysis of doctrine legal documents and jurisprudence, five significant cases will be studied in order to provide the reader with contextual perspective.

The five cases studied are: the US/France Air Services Agreement Dispute, the Nicaragua case, the India/Pakistan Hijacking Incident, the Tehran Hostages case and the shooting of Korean Air Lines 007. These case have in common that the states involved resorted to 'countermeasures' as well as mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of the dispute, which reflects the basic issue in the debate on the concept of countermeasures namely: is the right to take countermeasures subjected to a prior obligation to resort to international dispute mechanisms.

Math Noortmann teaches public international law at the School of Law of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He has been a guest lecturer at several universities in Europe, China and Indonesia. He is a member of the ILA Committee on the Teaching of International Law. Countermeasures in International Law; Five Salient Cases is a revised version of his 1997 Ph.D. thesis. Other monographs include Enforcing International Law; Help to Self-Contained regimes (Ashgate)- and Internationaal Recht (Boom publishers).

His research focuses on international dispute settlement and conflict. resolution, state responsibility and non-state actors. Articles have been published on the ILC draft on state responsibility, the status of armed opposition groups in international law, the US Container Security Initiative and peacekeeping operations and Dutch constitutional law. He is founder and co-editor of a series on Non state actors in international. law, politics and governance (Ashgate).