Syllabus
The law of international treaties is presumably the most practical branch of international public law. Each lawyer deals with treaties, no matter in which field of practice or theory s/he works. The regulations governing this branch of law are contained in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), which is also binding on the Czech Republic, and is published under No 15/1988 Coll.
The Vienna Convention (1969) is a very successful work of the UNO Commission for International Law, which drafted its text and provided it with commentaries referring to individual articles. Though it has viewed many institutions in a totally new way, the international practice has soon accepted them almost without reservations, and so content of the law of international treaties as it is provided in the Vienna Convention (1969) has become part of generally applicable international custom law, which is aimed at making international treaties by those states which for some reason are not, or so far have not, become participants of the above mentioned Vienna Convention.
Apart from standard elements of concluding treaties, and their coming into force, as well as working with them (e.g. stipulations and reservations, their interpretation, relationship to national law etc.) this document gives an account of their discharge in view of consequential substantial alteration of circumstances (former doctrine rebus sic stantibus), or a consequence of its serious breaching. This document also gives the circumstances of the nullity of a treaty, both voidable (by mistake etc.), or void (for enforced treaties). For the first time, this document contains the definition of the rule juris cogentis and consequences of its possible contradictions with the content of the given contractual rule.
The reason for including the problems of liability was primarily their novelty, for (cca 50 years´ preparation) only in the summer of 2001 the Commission for the international law submitted its final proposal for the codification of liability rules. Although both practitioners and specialists from the public urgently called for its completion, most probably they would be disappointed by the level of its processing. Therefore, instead of the draft of a long awaited codification convention, they will most probably see only a non-binding declaration of the UN General Assembly; in fact this will be decided by the 6th Commission (Legal Commission), which is currently in session.
The reason was that the present special reporter on this question, J. R. Crawford (Australia) was not content with mere remarks by member states concerning the original version of the proposal (in the so-called first reading), so he imputed his own idea about the content of the given proposal to the above Commission. Now it substantially differs from the original version of the first reading. It was stated that some substantial thematic aspects would be studied additionally. Among them are the institute of unilateral obligations (acts) and liability for their non-fulfillment, the whole category of diplomatic protection, but primarily the concept jus cogens itself, i.e. the issues, which ought to have been made clear for a long time because they are particularly relevant for the present text of the proposal.
Despite this fact, the present stage of the work that has been done by the Commission in this aspect is very precious material, since so far the problems of the liability of states for their possible unlawful acts was only a matter of doctrine, which could do nothing more but rest upon judgments. In many aspects Crawford´s concept of international law liability is interesting and therefore worth attention at least, if sometimes not even agreement.
Annotation
Pro současné mezinárodní právo je charakteristická kodifikace obecně platných obyčejových pravidel. Výběrový předmět má přiblížit proces kodifikace v obecnosti, dále práci Komise OSN pro mezinárodní právo, ale také poskytnout hlubší znalosti dvou nejvýznamnějších kodifikovaných oblastí mezinárodního práva (právo mezinárodních smluv a odpovědnost států).