50 ANDREJEVA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINION principles of international law concerning the attribution of State responsibility for acts or omissions under the Convention (see Ilaşcu and Others v. Moldova and Russia [GC], no. 48787/99, §§ 320 and 322, ECHR 2004-VII). It is not for the Court, even through the special character of the Convention or implicitly, to develop new rules for the identification of entities that can have rights and obligations for the purposes of international law. The fact that the Latvian SSR was a former republic of the Soviet Union does not at all mean that the State of Latvia has some automatic obligations that appertain to the territory concerned during its illegal occupation. On the contrary, saying or implying that Latvia has some automatic obligations stemming from the Soviet period would defy the fact that the occupation and annexation of Latvia were illegal in international law and it would raise a question as to the Court’s compliance with the general principle of ex injuria non jus oritur and the obligation of nonrecognition in international law (see points 29 and 34-36 below). 23. The fact that Latvia may take some responsibility over what happened in the territory of the Latvian SSR does not mean that there was an obligation to do so. This is generally the case in situations involving the creation of new States and the disappearance of old States, where the responsible State has to be identified and where the “clean slate” rule has dominated State practice. It is only through significant efforts that some rules challenging the “clean slate” approach have emerged over the last two or three decades (see, among many authorities, P. Dumberry, State Succession to International Responsibility, Leiden, Boston, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2007, pp. 52-58). Given this complex area of international law, the principle of cooperation and inter-State negotiations has been seen as a key principle and was rightly supported by the Court in the case of Kovačić and Others (cited above), while ignored in the present case (see point 8 above). 24. The Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, a very recent body dealing with particular State continuity/State succession claims, observed that as concerns obligations to pay pensions, State practice varied. In some cases, following the partition of a unitary State, each of the successors assumed the responsibility for pensions attributable to the predecessor State payable to persons in the successor’s territory. The Claims Commission noted that the law stated in the Danzig Pension Case was still relevant. The court in that case allocated responsibility for pensions based on the nationality of the recipient, assigning responsibility for pensions to the successor State whose nationality the recipient had assumed (Danzig Pension Case, Ann. Dig. vol. V, case no. 41). To the extent that the Danzig Pension Case might be relevant to situations of illegal annexation (for a clear exclusion of such situations from the scope of codification of the law of State succession, see Yearbook of the International Law Commission, 1999, vol. II (Part Two), p. 27; see also point 26 below), it involves an