 Let me turn to another question relating to the armed attack. That question is temporal. Article 51 reads, if an armed attack occurs. The French version of the charter also uses the present tense. Well does that mean that the armed attack must have already happened in order for the right of self-defense to be triggered? And that question has been hotly debated in the legal literature. Notably during the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were on the rise. In light of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it is very unlikely that the United States or any other drafter of the charter would have signed the charter if Article 51 meant that the state had to wait and sit idle until actually bombed and could not intercept an ongoing armed attack before distraction materialized. And there is actually a large consensus today, according to which imminent threats of armed attack are covered by Article 51. And this has notably been recognized by the UN Secretary General in his report entitled In Larger Freedom that was tabled in 2005 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the UN. Likewise, the Institute of International Law, considered in a resolution adopted two years later in 2007 and that you can find also in the reading material, the Institute said that, I quote, the right of self-defense arises for the target state in case of an actual or manifestly imminent armed attack, end of quote, but the Institute rejected doctrines of so-called preventive self-defense. The possibility to use force in self-defense in case of an imminent threat of armed attack is sometimes traced back to the formula used by the US Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, in the diplomatic letter he addressed to his British counterpart following what is called the Caroline incident in 1837. The Caroline was a ship used by Canadian insurgents and it was anchored on the other side of the Niagara River. During a night raid, British troops crossed the border to the US and destroyed the Caroline. The US complained to the British government and diplomatic correspondence ensued between the two countries. In his diplomatic note, Secretary Webster famously referred to, I quote, the necessity of self-defense, instant overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation. Although the legal backdrop at the time of Webster was completely different from what it is today, his words carry still a certain authority and are revered to the necessity of self-defense in a moment. Let me address another point about what constitutes an armed attack. Article 51 refers to an armed attack against a member of the United Nations, but because self-defense is a right under custom international law, it exists also to the benefit of all states and not only states that are members of the UN. A more tricky issue, however, is whether an armed attack against the nationals of a state by or with the complicity of the authority of the states, the state where those foreign nationals are present, if such an attack constitutes an armed attack allowing the parent state to use force in self-defense in order to protect its nationals. Rescuing nationals abroad does not raise any legal problem when it is done with the consent of the territorial state. But it has raised controversy absent such consent, even when foreign nationals were deliberately targeted by the territorial state. There have been several cases in which the parent state has justified its military rescue operations on the basis of self-defense, but such extension of the notion of armed attack against a state to encompass attacks against its nationals, such extension is usually considered as being fairly far-fetched, and the rescue operation is probably better justified on the basis of necessity as a circumstance precluding wrongfulness provided, of course, that such a rescue operation does not amount to an armed attack against the territorial state. But even when the use of force remains strictly limited in scope and in intensity, the legality of a rescue operation could be put in doubt by those who consider that the prohibition to use force is as a whole a rule having a parametry character. Finally, let me conclude this video by assuming that the author of the armed attack is another state and that the military reaction in self-defense is directed at that state. And this is indeed how self-defense has been conceived and has been applied for a very long time, and it was probably so patently obvious to the drafters of the Charter that Article 51 is silent on the matter. But does the silence of the Charter allow to consider that when the armed attack is carried out by a non-state actor, a terrorist group, for instance, the right of self-defense is triggered? I'll revert to that question, but let us first turn to the conditions pertaining to the exercise of the right of self-defense.