International responsibility of a state for certain unlawful behaviour is currently determined by actual attribution of this behaviour to the state. However, international cyberspace is a special environment in which certain operations are usually hardly attributable to specific actors. As a result, the question arises how to establish the responsibility of the state for unlawful operations in cyberspace and whether to establish state’s responsibility for the operations that merely stem out of the computers on its territory.
In order to understand the impacts of special character of cyberspace on state responsibility, this paper deeply examines the notions of “unlawful behaviour” and “responsibility of states”. It distinguishes different models of state responsibility from the historical perspective and applies this distinction on cyberspace. Consequently, it claims that the character of cyberspace could summon the older and more primitive form of state responsibility.
