Acceso usuarios
Marko Milanovic, Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos
This Symposium examines the International Law Commission's work on reservations, specifically its recently completed Guide to Practice on Reservations to Treaties. The topic is very technical and the Guide itself gigantic, standing, together with its commentaries, at over 600 pages. The topic of reservations to treaties has been on the ILC's agenda since 1993; its Special Rapporteur, Professor Alain Pellet, produced 17 reports with many addenda and annexes. The ILC's work was so seemingly endless that it inspired (gentle and good-natured) parody. But now it has indeed come to an end. It needs to be assessed, and the purpose of this Symposium is to initiate that debate.
The law of treaties with regard to reservations is, in our experience, one of the hardest areas of law to grasp, teach, or condense and simplify without loss of accuracy. The Guide will thus inevitably be of the greatest interest to those among us who deal with reservations regularly, for instance legal advisers in ministries of foreign affairs. The Guide will probably not be of fundamental importance to the work of practically every international lawyer out there. But this is not to say that its importance for the non-specialist should be underestimated; there are many lessons to be absorbed from the Guide and the process through which it was created.
In that regard, it is remarkable to see just how much the Guide elaborates on the reservations regime of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). That regime, consisting of six short articles, was certainly the product of its time. It was precipitated by the Reservations to the Genocide Convention Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, in which the Court moved the law forward from a rigid system requiring unanimous acceptance of reservations by all �
