consent state responsibility

In the law of state responsibility, consent is one of the recognized circumstances that can preclude the wrongfulness of an act that would otherwise breach an international obligation. The principle is codified in Article 20 of the International Law Commission's Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), adopted by the ILC in 2001 and commended to states by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 56/83.

Article 20 provides that "valid consent by a State to the commission of a given act by another State precludes the wrongfulness of that act in relation to the former State to the extent that the act remains within the limits of that consent." In other words, when State A genuinely agrees to conduct by State B that would otherwise violate an obligation owed to State A, State B does not incur responsibility toward State A for that conduct.

Several conditions must be met:

• The consent must be valid — given freely, by an authority competent to bind the state, and not procured by coercion, error, or corruption (drawing on analogies from the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties).
• It must be clearly established, not merely presumed.
• It must be given in advance or contemporaneously with the act; subsequent acquiescence is treated differently (as waiver of the right to invoke responsibility).
• The act must stay within the scope of what was consented to.
• Consent cannot preclude wrongfulness of breaches of peremptory norms (jus cogens), per Article 26 ARSIWA — a state cannot, for example, consent to genocide or aggression on its territory.

Typical scenarios include consent to the stationing of foreign troops, transit of military aircraft, law-enforcement operations on another state's territory, or humanitarian access. The ILC commentary to Article 20 cites examples such as one state's consent to another's investigation on its territory. The ICJ touched on related issues in Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (DRC v. Uganda), 2005, where the scope and withdrawal of Congolese consent to Ugandan military presence was central.