Three problems surround this first sense of the relationship between coercive norms and the international community. First, is an international legal order of such a community possible if its norms are the totality of the will of the members of the community? These members have the legal authority to decide who their nationals or members are. Does an international community that submits to such freedom of its members demand the exclusion of individuals, groups or societies from the community? For example, is a person “lawfully in the territory of a State party” to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights if he or she is not legally recognized by any State in the aggregated international community? Does a person have a duty if state officials consider him or her an insurgent, an illegal combatant or a terrorist? Do mandatory standards leave some people unprotected? Many large States have accepted this concept. Some of them have ratified the Vienna Convention, while others have declared in their official declarations that they accept the Vienna Convention as “codifying”. Some have applied the concept in their relations with international organizations and other States. The idiosyncratic author here is not the state, but a cadre of interpreters. Their rationally coherent narrative structure limits state actions. A self-generating author is constructed to implicitly agree with the narrative. According to this theory, there would be no international community without singer-songwriters willing and able to debate concepts. In particular, opinio juris will play an important role in the identity and building of the international community. The international community is committed to an objectivity intellectually constructed by opinio juris. And the author is the interpreter of such objectivity. When Franck focuses on the issue, who are the members of the community? he admits that members are states.81 Dworkin also takes this for granted.

The focus on the ethics of the international community examines why a State or non-State is bound by the legal order of the international community. The search for the identity of a legal norm in relation to its source is erroneous when it comes to the ethics of the international community. The international community “as a whole” is not only for its members, but also independent of its members. Such a possibility arises when we understand compelling norms immersed in socio-cultural ethics. Mandatory standards protect the ethics of an international community. Fundamentally, the acts of intellectualization of the jurist reify what we might otherwise consider an international community if we do not associate such actions with the ethics in which we find ourselves. This philosophy is what is objectified when officials approach a compelling norm as if it were a discrete and distinct concept, the justification of which lies in one of the State-centric sources of the modern international legal order. A legal discourse that revolves around such a search for the identity of an independent norm misjudges the question of whether the norm is binding in a legal system. As H.L.A. Hart once explained in a forgotten passage, a “social bond [is emphasis] binds the obligated person. [Emphasis added] which is buried in the word “obligation.” [T]he figure .

continues [emphasis added] many legal considerations.” 120 A peremptory norm requires that its relationship with the idea of an international community itself be thorough. In particular, the opacity surrounding the identity of peremptory norms raises a number of unresolved issues. A member of the international community would have a legal interest in enforcing mandatory standards, even if it has not been violated. It is said that individuals and groups are harmed because of the violation of peremptory norms, and yet, until relatively recently, only States were considered members of the international community. An individual or group may be entitled to claim compensation for damage to peremptory norms, but the State that violates a peremptory norm may not have consented to its position.