 By the peace treaty of Versailles, Germany was made responsible for the war under article 231 of the treaty. It gave rise to the Kriegsschuldfrager, the question of the culpability for the war, and the Germans came to resent such accusation as unjust and legally unfounded. Because when the First World War began in 1914, states were still free to use force to settle disputes. Germany accepted responsibility for having started the war against Belgium because its invasion of Belgium was in violation of Belgium's neutrality, of which Germany was a guarantor. But Germany's responsibility vis-à-vis France and the other Allied and associated powers was really a contractual creation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Covenant of the League of Nations transformed the war from a bilateral relations issue to a social problem for all the members of the League. Under article 11 of the Covenant, any war, whether or not affecting a member of the new organization, any war was set to be of concern to the whole League. And between the members of the League, articles 12, 13 and 15, and 16, provided for a system of settlement of disputes that were likely to endanger peace, a system by which arbitration was preferred, or also the political decisions by the Council of the League. Member states complying with the procedure were protected from any attack by the other disputing states, while the state going to war in breach of the Covenant was considered to have committed an act of war against all the other members of the League. However, under article 15 of the Covenant, the member states had the right to take such action as they shall consider necessary for the maintenance of right and justice, including the use of force, if the Council of the League failed to reach a report. So the Covenant tried to limit the use of force, but did not outlaw war outright. In 1928, and as I already recall during week one of this course, the Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an instrument of national policy was signed in Paris. It was a joint endeavor of Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Affairs Minister, and the American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg. About 60 states became bound by that treaty, which in substance consisted of two straight forward provisions. By article one, parties to the treaty I quote solemnly declared, in the names of their respective peoples, that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another end of quote. Under article two, parties agreed to settle their disputes by peaceful means only. The Treaty of Paris was a radical step towards what was called at the time the outlawry of war. However, its success was not great, and it was blatantly breached when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, when the Soviet Union and Germany acting jointly invaded Poland in 1939, and a few months later when the Soviet Union invaded Finland. However, because the Kellogg-Briand pact was universally enforced by 1939, the Nuremberg Tribunal was able to use it to serve as a legal basis for the crime against peace. If the Paris Treaty was a legal development of fundamental importance, it had nevertheless two weaknesses. First, it was never incorporated in the Covenant of the League of Nations, to which the US never became a member. Second, it was also structured as a quid pro quo, in the sense that the failure by one party to a dispute, to settle that dispute peacefully in good faith, entitled the other party to the dispute, not to discharge its obligations, not to use force. The Paris Treaty was, well, a treaty, the substantial breach of the obligation to settle peacefully, for instance by flatly rejecting to go to arbitration, could entail the suspension of the obligation not to use force. And this reciprocity element was made clear by the drafters of the treaty when they submitted it for approval to their respective parliaments. This quid pro quo structure of the prohibition to use force was abandoned when the United Nations Charter was drafted. The Charter is, of course, a treaty, but by the Charter the logic of the outlawry of war shifted from a contractual relationship to an institutional issue. And after this historical introduction, let us turn now to the Charter provisions.