 It is not because unilateral secession is not prohibited as such under a rule of general international law that any people, any region and any province around the world would have a positive right under international law to secede and to declare independence. There is indeed a difference between having a right to do something and simply having the possibility, the freedom to do it and the absence of the right to do a certain thing does not mean that doing such thing would be prohibited. In the Kosovo advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice stressed that, I quote, it is entirely possible for a particular act such as a unilateral declaration of independence not to be in violation of international law without necessarily constituting the exercise of a right conferred by it, and of quote, however certain peoples have been conferred a positive entitlement to become independent. Those peoples not only have the possibility to declare independence without breaching any rule of general international law, but they actually have the right under international law to do so. Such a right to become independent unquestionably exists today in favour of non-self-governing territories and peoples subject to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation. And before addressing this important normative development and turning to the scope, the content and the nature of the right of peoples to self-determination, before doing that it is worth recalling briefly how collective entities that are not states came to be granted some rights under international law so as to acquire a certain international legal personality. And the first step stoned the way for later developments, the idea according to which some people could be endowed with the right to become independent, and to become independent states, that first idea stems from the practice of the Allied and associated powers during the First World War. In the name of the so-called principle of nationalities, according to which each people making a nation within the multinational Austrian-Hungarian empire had the right to become a state, the Allied and associated powers recognised the Polish and Czechoslovak nations during the war and considered them as core belligerents despite the fact that they were part of the territories of their enemy. And when the war came to an end, the peace treaties of 1919 dismantled the age-old multinational empire and replaced it by several new states. So the idea that a group, a people, a nation, that a group could be the bearer of a legitimate entitlement to become a state was already present in the early years of the 20th century. And furthermore, the covenant of the League of Nations established, as I recalled earlier, established a mandate system to look after the peoples of the former German colonies and also of some territories that were previously under Ottoman rule. Under Article 22 of the covenant, those mandate people were peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. According to what was perceived at the time and with the Euro-centred prejudices as their degree of development, those peoples were administered under mandates A, B or C. However, common to all those types of mandates was the duty of the mandatory powers to look after, I quote, the well-being and development of those peoples in the name of a sacred trust of civilization. So there again, peoples were identified as bearers of specific rights and their territories were conferred an international status because they were not simply part of the territorial sovereignty of the mandatory power. Let us turn now to post-World War II practice in the next video.