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MalvinasFacts

About & Methodology

Purpose

MalvinasFacts is an independent digital repository on the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) sovereignty dispute. It is built for journalists, academics, and international lawyers who need a citable, source-verified reference — not for a general Argentine audience, and not as a partisan advocacy platform.

What this is — and is not

This project applies journalistic and academic standards of rigor: every factual claim, legal argument, and diplomatic position is expected to cite a verifiable source. It is not a legal filing, an evidentiary archive for litigation, or a document with legal standing before any court or tribunal. Readers should treat it as a starting point for their own research and verification, not as a primary source in itself.

Naming and editorial convention

This site uses "Malvinas (Falkland Islands)" as its editorial convention in its name and titles. That choice of name does not imply a position on the merits of the sovereignty dispute: the site presents the arguments and sources of both parties.

In direct quotations, in United Nations documents and in the sources of each party, the original name used by the source is kept — for example, "Falkland Islands (Malvinas)" in United Nations usage.

Editorial standards

  • Every article, timeline event, resolution entry, and country classification must cite a source.
  • Content that has not yet been verified against a primary or reputable secondary source is flagged as unverified, both in the visible interface and in the underlying database record.
  • The design intentionally avoids the visual language of national symbolism, in order to read as a neutral reference source rather than an advocacy site.
  • Where no author is shown, the entry is attributed to MalvinasFacts as a project.
  • A quotation from a source in another language appears in the original, with an English translation by the project marked “our translation”; where an official translation exists (for example in United Nations documents), that translation is cited and named as such.

The International Position Tracker's five categories reflect a deliberate evidentiary bar, not a simple tally of votes. "Declared Support for Argentina" and "Supports UK Position" are reserved for a current, explicit, individually-attributed official statement — a named government or ministry taking that side of the sovereignty question, not merely joining a bloc statement calling for negotiations, which nearly every state would agree to without taking either side. A country whose only public record on this question is how it voted on a UN General Assembly resolution, with no such statement attached, is classified as "Historical Voting Record Only" instead — distinct from both an explicit current position and from "Neutral / No Stated Position", which covers countries with no clear alignment either way (including some with a documented but genuinely mixed or reversing voting history, or a substantive but non-aligned statement at a UN forum). This distinction was introduced after review showed several countries carrying a decades-old "Supports UK Position" classification on vote history alone, with no current statement to support it. Both parties to the dispute are listed too, each under the category that matches its own stated position (Argentina under "Declared Support for Argentina", the United Kingdom under "Supports UK Position"), so that the map and table treat the two sides alike.

Scope of the legal-historical repository

Coverage focuses on the legal doctrines invoked in the dispute — including uti possidetis iuris, the applicability (or inapplicability) of self-determination to an implanted population, and comparative precedents such as Chagos Archipelago (Mauritius v. United Kingdom) before the International Court of Justice — alongside the documented historical and diplomatic record from 1833 to the present.

Editorial team

Articles may carry a named author and a named reviewer.

  • Juan Ignacio Vera — Editorial lead

Corrections policy

Accuracy matters more than speed, and errors that are confirmed are corrected.

Privacy

This site uses aggregate, cookieless analytics (Vercel Web Analytics) to count page views. It sets no cookies and does not record personal data or track visitors across sites.

Coverage and known limits

Every United Nations member state has been checked in at least one way: the search of its foreign ministry's own website (where the site's search works, it was tested first with a word that must return results), the official records of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization from 1999 to 2025, or both. Finding nothing is recorded as such and is not the same as the state having no position.

As of October 2026 the following states could not be fully checked, so the absence of an entry for them is weaker evidence than for the rest:

  • Ministry website unreachable, down or without a working page at the time of the last attempt: Bahamas, Benin, Central African Republic, Comoros, Eswatini, Mali, Mongolia, South Sudan, Sudan, Zimbabwe.
  • Website reachable but blocking automated access, or with a search that returns errors or no usable results: Finland, Liechtenstein, the Philippines. For Lesotho only a few pages could be read by hand.
  • Search works, but the local-language spelling of the islands' names (Dhivehi for the Maldives, Khmer for Cambodia) has not been confirmed by a native speaker; the English-language search found nothing.

Project status

This site is under active development. Coverage is intentionally not exhaustive: it currently focuses on the doctrines, resolutions, timeline events, and country positions described above rather than every source that could bear on the dispute. Any future draft content that hasn't yet been verified against a primary or reputable secondary source will be explicitly flagged as unverified until it is.