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Mr. Chairman, I will speak today on four topics – reservations to treaties, unilateral acts of states, the obligation to extradite or prosecute, and fragmentation of international law.
New Zealand welcomes the second part of the tenth report on the topic of “Reservations to Treaties”, and thanks the Special Rapporteur, Mr Alain Pellet, for his thorough and careful work. We see no particular difficulties in the guidelines and commentaries adopted by the Commission during this last session on validity of reservations.
The Special Rapporteur’s report contains a great deal of useful material in particular on the difficult issue of reservations incompatible with the object and purpose of a treaty. We look forward to the Commission’s further consideration of the Special Rapporteur’s draft guidelines relating to definition of the object and purpose of the treaty and determination of the validity of reservations.
We welcome the recommendation that the Secretariat, in consultation with the Special Rapporteur, organize a meeting with United Nations human rights experts, including representatives of monitoring bodies. We anticipate that this engagement will be productive for the Commission’s work on this issue.
We see the “Preliminary conclusions of the International Law Commission on Reservations to Normative Multilateral Treaties including Human Rights Treaties” as a broadly satisfactory statement of principles relating to reservations to multilateral human rights treaties.
New Zealand welcomes the adoption of guiding principles by the Commission on the topic “Unilateral Acts of States”, and thanks the Commission and the Special Rapporteur, Mr. Victor Rodríguez-Cedeño, for his tireless work.
We have previously encouraged the Commission to conclude its work on this topic by drawing some reasonably broad conclusions from the case studies it has considered. Accordingly we commend the Commission for completion of the guiding principles and believe that they represent a useful and appropriate conclusion to this topic.
We believe a key conclusion to draw from the set of guiding principles is that the binding legal effects which unilateral acts may produce are not limited only to unilateral acts in the strict sense. As is clear from the preambular paragraphs and guiding principle 3, in some circumstances a unilateral act may result in a State being bound by its actions even though this may not have been its intent. It will depend on the particular circumstances of the case, although it will be important if other States rely on the particular unilateral act.
We think this work strikes an appropriate balance between two main goals: to ensure States are encouraged to conduct their relations and resolve their disputes through productive and open dialogue, while, on the other hand, ensuring that States exercise due care in making declarations including upon which other States may rely.
We appreciate that unilateral acts has been a difficult topic for the Commission and commend the efforts of Mr. Rodríguez-Cedeño and the Working Group, chaired by Mr Alain Pellet, for bringing it to a successful conclusion during this current quinquennium.
New Zealand welcomes the preliminary report on the topic of “The Obligation to Extradite or Prosecute” and commends the Special Rapporteur, Mr Zdzislaw Galicki, for his efforts. The report is a very useful overview that leaves us in no doubt as to the complexity of the subject but also indicates the potential for a useful contribution by the Commission.
As recognised by the Special Rapporteur, the starting point for such an inquiry must be a thorough analysis of the international treaty obligations and national laws bearing upon the obligation to extradite or prosecute.
We look forward to the Special Rapporteur’s next report and the Commission’s further consideration of this topic, which we hope will establish a clear focus for the future work.
We commend the adoption of the conclusions of the Commission’s Study Group on the topic of “Fragmentation of International Law”, and thank the Chairman of the Study Group, Mr Martti Koskenniemi, for his hard work and intellectual leadership.
We believe the Commission’s work on this topic contributes to a wider understanding of the underlying linkages and overall coherence of the international legal system. The conclusions are a practical set of concise statements that will help legal advisers deal with fragmentation issues that they may encounter. The longer analytical study is much like the commentaries to a set of draft articles; it is the substantive source that explains and backs up the concise statements.
The Commission has obviously worked hard this session to complete discussion of the remaining analytical studies and draft conclusions drawn from those areas, thus enabling it to consider and adopt the full two-part outcome in the current quinquennium. Completion of this work is an impressive achievement and an excellent example of collaboration within the Commission, given the range of experts involved in preparing the individual studies that formed the building blocks for this work.
We think the product for the topic is a very good example of the valuable work of a non-traditional kind that the Commission may consider in future.
We congratulate the Commission once again for its impressive achievements over the current quinquennium. We note the inclusion of several new topics on the long-term programme of work. The topic of “Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters” appears to us to be of increasing importance with the frequency and severity of natural disasters that seem to be occurring as a result of global climate change. We hope that the Commission will therefore find it possible to consider this topic in the near future.
Thank you Mr Chairman.
