Joseph Caplan's List: FSO Prep

• Though the law of democracy is not yet a fully self-contained component of international law, there has been an undeniable process, based in parts on custom and the collective interpretation of treaties, towards a right to "democratic governance."[2]
• The right of self-determination empowers a "people organized in an established territory to determine its collective political destiny in a democratic fashion."[4]
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1967.
• The covenant was an important milestone in the evolution of an ‘internal' right to self-determination and contains the most detailed requirements of democracy. Related to self-determination is the notion of popular sovereignty, the "most fundamental principle of democracy."[6]
• ICCPR, which, in addition to furthering notions of self-determination and popular sovereignty, also set forth the rights and freedoms essential to a well-working democracy: freedom of assembly, association, movement, and speech
• The final prong in the evolving right to democratic governance is the "emerging normative requirement of a participatory electoral process."[11] Unsurprisingly, this was first alluded to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognized the right of every individual to participate in the political life of the nation through "periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."[12] The ICCPR went on to recognize the importance of elections, which lie at the "core of the democratic government based on the consent of the people."[13]
• Monitoring national elections is now an accepted activity of the UN,

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