By 1960 the balance at the United Nations had shifted. More than a dozen new African members joined that year alone, and the anticolonial majority in the General Assembly set out to turn self-determination from a principle into a rule. On 14 December 1960 the Assembly adopted Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
Resolution 1514
The declaration was sweeping. It said that subjecting peoples to alien domination denied fundamental human rights and violated the UN Charter, and that all peoples had the right of self-determination. Resolution 1514 declared that a lack of preparedness must never justify delaying independence, rejecting the old colonial argument that peoples had to be "ready" first. It passed with 89 in favor, none against and 9 abstaining, the abstainers including the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and South Africa. No state was willing to vote against it in public.
The next day the Assembly adopted Resolution 1541, which spelled out what counted as a full measure of self-government. Resolution 1541 recognized three outcomes: independence, free association with another state or integration into one. The second and third had to reflect the freely expressed wishes of the people. That is why places such as Puerto Rico, the Cook Islands and Greenland have had such different debates about their status. In 1961 the Assembly created a Special Committee on Decolonization to monitor progress, still often called the Committee of 24.
In 1966 the two great human rights covenants, one on civil and political rights and one on economic, social and cultural rights, opened with the same article. Common Article 1 of the 1966 covenants states that all peoples have the right of self-determination. Self-determination thus moved into the core of human rights law, alongside freedom of speech and the right to work. Its placement made a claim worth noticing: individual dignity cannot be secure under a government a people never chose.
Who counts as a people?
The hardest question was who held the right. If every ethnic group could claim statehood, most new states would break apart. The answer that prevailed was narrow. The "salt water" doctrine limited the right of independence to overseas colonies, territories separated from their rulers by sea and distinct in ethnicity or culture. Belgium argued in the 1950s that the same logic should cover indigenous peoples inside existing states, in Latin America for example. The majority rejected this "Belgian thesis," partly because it threatened many members' own unity. After 1960, self-determination therefore usually meant independence for a whole colony within its colonial borders, not for groups within it.
The doctrine had costs. Peoples split by colonial borders, or ruled by neighbors after independence, found little support. Biafra's attempt to leave Nigeria failed in a war from 1967 to 1970 that killed perhaps a million people or more, many through famine. New states emerged from old ones only rarely, and usually after long wars: Bangladesh in 1971, Eritrea in 1993, South Sudan in 2011.
Courts and the remaining territories
The International Court of Justice became an arena too. In 1971 it advised that South Africa's continued presence in Namibia, the former German colony of South West Africa that South Africa had held as a mandate, was illegal. Namibia became independent in 1990. In 2019 the Court advised that Britain's separation of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius was unlawful, because Britain had broken up a colony before independence without the free consent of its people. Britain had expelled the islanders to make way for an American base on Diego Garcia. In 2025 Britain and Mauritius signed a treaty transferring sovereignty while leasing Diego Garcia back for 99 years.
The UN Trusteeship Council, which oversaw former mandates and territories taken from the defeated powers, eventually ran out of work. The Trusteeship Council suspended its operations in 1994 after Palau, the last trust territory, became independent. Yet the UN's list is not empty. Seventeen territories remain on the UN's list of non-self-governing territories, among them Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, New Caledonia, Guam and Western Sahara. Some have voted to keep their links; others remain in dispute.
Worked example: Western Sahara
Spain ruled Western Sahara until 1975, when both Morocco and Mauritania claimed it. In October 1975 the International Court of Justice found that historic ties existed between the territory and both neighbors but that none amounted to sovereignty, so the people's right to self-determination applied. Within weeks King Hassan II sent about 350,000 Moroccan civilians across the border in the Green March. Spain withdrew, and Morocco and Mauritania divided the territory. The Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement, proclaimed a republic in 1976 and fought both. Mauritania withdrew in 1979, and Morocco, behind long defensive sand walls, came to control most of the territory.
A UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991 promised a referendum, but disputes over who could vote stalled it, and it has never been held. In 2020 the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty, and several European governments have since backed Morocco's plan for autonomy within the kingdom. To supporters this is a realistic compromise. To many Sahrawis, tens of thousands of whom still live in refugee camps in Algeria, it denies the very right Resolution 1514 promised. The case shows how a clear legal principle can collide with power and geography.