Title of content: What Is International Law?

Can you imagine the condition where a superpower state is invading an inferior state for no
reason? When a foreign state’s jetfighters flying over another state’s airspace whenever
they want? Or when a foreign state’s vessels are taking another state’s natural resources in
its sea territory?

That is why the world needs a series of rules to regulate these kinds of relations, and that is
called “international law”. Basically international law regulates legal matter that is crossing
beyond country’s borders. There are two types of international law, private international
law and public international law and these two rule different scopes. Private international
law regulates private legal matters that’s involving more than one country. On the other
hand, public international law regulates all legal matters in public field. This video and the
subsquent videos will only be discussing the matters related to public international law.

So basically, international law is a bunch of rules that regulate the relations between states,
states and non-states parties or other subjects of international law.

The essential characteristic in international law is that all states in the world are in same
level. No state is superior than others, all states have equal obligations and rights before
international law. For example, any state has free choice whether they want to abide
themselves to certain rules of international law or not. Meanwhile a superpower country
like U.S cannot force a less powerful state to abide those rules.

International law regulates every aspect in international realm. For example, there is a
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which provisions all matters related to the
use of world’s sea and almost every country in the world has ratified it. Another example is
Paris Agreement in climate change matters, outer space treaty, and UN Charted which
constituted world’s largest organization.