THE INTERNATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY OF HOST STATES TO PROTECT DIPLOMATS DURING INTERNAL CONFLICTS AND DISTURBANCES: A CASE STUDY OF LIBYA

The primary mechanism used to resolve breaches of diplomatic protection is to accord states responsibility for due protection. This Public International Law approach works in the majority of cases except for very few cases such as in Libya, when incumbent governments struggle to maintain control over the national territory of their own states.

This thesis investigates problems with the current approach and proposes solutions through virtual diplomacy, to safe guard diplomats from imminent attacks while enabling diplomatic functions to continue using modern communications. In other words,a preventative approach. However, in the absence of virtual diplomacy, if diplomats are attacked or injured by non-state parties in a conflict environment such as Libya in the post-Gaddafi period, the question of reparations and punishment of offenders becomes a difficult process to achieve because of the political and security situation in the country. The starting point will still be the principle of state responsibility in terms of payment of reparations to the sending state of the injured diplomats or their families. The punishment of offenders will be for criminal law.This thesis contends that TJ can play a supporting or complementary role to state responsibility and criminal law. TJ can play role in terms of facilitating state responsibility for the protection of diplomats, fact finding, enabling the gathering of evidence and maybe even the assessment of reparations to be paid by armed rebel groups’ offenders such as Ansar al-Sharia in Libya whose actions have caused injury to foreign diplomats.