Il ruolo del diritto internazionale nel Comunicato finale del vertice NATO di Vilnius

The Vilnius Summit Communiqué, issued by NATO Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council on 11 July 2023, outlines the organization’s priorities and main commitments. Although the attention of the public opinion was focused on the issue of Ukraine’s possible membership in NATO, the communiqué – adopted a year after the 2022 Strategic Concept – is a much more complex text that certainly reflects the “revitalization” of the organization as well as the new scenarios to which the member states are increasingly turning their attention, far beyond the Euro-Atlantic geographical scope. The Vilnius Summit Communiqué is also a document that needs to be read from a legal perspective, if only because it appears to be a defining feature of NATO that of adherence to international law and the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, accompanied by a commitment to uphold “the rules-based international order”. Therefore, it is an interesting exercise to identify how the rules of international law are invoked, interpreted, and applied by the communiqué.