New paradigms of international legal cooperation and the contemporany of sovereignty

Abstract

Initially, the paper will do a brief historical tour of the recent expansion of the application of international legal cooperation, analyzing how the fast moving of people and richness around the world in the twentieth century increased the number of problems that cannot be solved by a state on it's own, making sovereignty - at first, an isolation mechanism - connect nations with common purposes. In sequence, will show how the incidence of the modern international law in the resolution of some border problems forced international legal cooperation to transform itself from a simple tool of the International Criminal Law into an essential tool for the satisfaction of human rights, with the development of treaties to support the new task, analysing some of those treaties. Continuing, the paper is going to reveal that the "world of sovereignties" is becoming a "world of people" and that the contemporary definition of sovereignty contains the duty to cooperate. In conclusion, the paper is going to reaffirm that making sovereignty tougher in order to avoid cooperation certainly weakens the ability of the states to control what happens in their territories and, consequently, their sovereignty.