Houses and condominium

Condominium (international law)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Joint sovereignty" redirects here. For joint sovereigns, see Coregency.
"Co-dominium" redirects here. For the series of books, see CoDominium.
This article is about the international law describing a territory in which two sovereign powers have equal rights. For other uses, see Condominium (disambiguation).
In international law, a condominium (plural either condominia, as in Latin, or condominiums) is a political territory (state or border area) in or over which multiple sovereign powers formally agree to share equal dominium (in the sense of sovereignty) and exercise their rights jointly, without dividing it into "national" zones.

Although a condominium has always been recognized as a theoretical possibility, condominia have been rare in practice. A major problem, and the reason so few have existed, is the difficulty of ensuring co-operation between the sovereign powers; once the understanding fails, the status is likely to become untenable.

The word is recorded in English since c. 1714, from Modern Latin, apparently coined in Germany c. 1700 from Latin com- "together" + dominium "right of ownership" (compare domain). A condominium of three sovereign powers is sometimes called a tripartite condominium or tridominium.