In association with the International Commission of Jurists

February 2014

06 Feb

[Dr. Bart Szewczyk is an Associate in Law at Columbia Law] This excellent article provides an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of the original understanding of Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention of the Law of the Treaties.  Its careful attention to the factual details, articulated in an elegant narrative, provides a vivid picture of the debates and decisions in Vienna.  And its comprehensive analysis of the historical record corrects any modern misperceptions as to what the drafters of the VCLT expected as the rules applicable to treaty interpretation.  The follow-on question, as the article notes, is “whether a regular and uncontested contrary practice has arisen—not just as a matter of what interpreters say, but of what they do—sufficient to undercut that original understanding.” (at 785). Indeed, alongside the VCLT, there may exist several conventions (in the commonwealth, rather than international, sense of the term) governing interpretation for particular treaties, courts, or jurisdictions.  Such contemporary customs or practice may be as important in interpreting treaties as the rules of the VCLT.  For instance, judgments of the International Court of Justice are formally binding only between the parties to a particular case.  The ordinary meaning of the text of Article 59 of the Court’s Statute—the “decision of the Court has no binding force except between the parties and in respect of that particular case”—allows for no other interpretation.  Yet, any State would be highly remiss—and its advocates would border on malpractice—if it argued that an ICJ judgment on a specific legal question should be disregarded because it is not binding.  On the other hand, judicial decisions of other courts may be granted less weight in the ICJ, even though formally, they have equal status with ICJ judgments under Article 38(1)(d) of the ICJ Statute as “subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law.” Or take Article 27 of the U.N. Charter:
Decisions of the Security Council on all other matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members including the concurring votes of the permanent members.
In the Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa), the ICJ held that “concurring,” notwithstanding its apparent textual clarity and travaux to the contrary, included voluntary abstentions from voting.  The Court’s interpretation was based on the “consistent[] and uniform[]” practice of the Security Council.” (para. 22).  As for the U.N. Charter so too for the VCLT, subsequent practice can inform or even transform the original interpretation of a treaty provision. The article recognizes this tension between the original understanding of the VCLT and subsequent interpretive practice of international courts.  It notes that 
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06 Feb

[Richard Gardiner is a Visiting Professor at University College London, Faculty of Laws] The article which this symposium addresses is important, timely, and elegant. It is an important study because it examines one of the most common misunderstandings about the VCLT provisions on the role of preparatory work in treaty interpretation. It lays to rest the mistaken idea that an interpreter may only consider preparatory work if interpretation of a treaty provision by applying the general rule reveals ambiguity or obscurity, or leads to a result which is manifestly absurd or unreasonable. As the study shows, these considerations are only prerequisites for use of preparatory work to determine meaning, not for its much wider role of confirming meaning. This is particularly timely because the ILC may itself have given the misleading impression in its recent (and otherwise very useful) work on subsequent agreements and practice, suggesting that any recourse to preparatory work is limited by preconditions:
Article 32 includes a threshold between the primary means of interpretation according to article 31, all of which are to be taken into account in the process of interpretation, and “supplementary means of interpretation” to which recourse may be had when the interpretation according to article 31 leaves the meaning of the treaty or its terms ambiguous or obscure or leads to a result which is manifestly absurd or unreasonable. (ILC 2013 Report, Chapter IV, A/68/10, p 14, Commentary on Draft Conclusion 1, para (3), footnote omitted.)
This seems to lose the careful distinction in the 1969 ILC/VCLT scheme between general use of preparatory work to confirm and its conditioned use to determine meaning. The most elegant feature of the study is its use of the preparatory work of the VCLT to confirm the proper meaning of the Vienna provisions themselves.
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05 Feb

For those who try to keep up with the shifting nature of radical Islamist groups – groups too many in the media sometimes wrongly link to Al Qaeda –the stories earlier this week on the group formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, now calling itself ISIS, are significant: Early Monday morning the leadership of al-Qaeda disowned Islamic State of Iraq...

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05 Feb

[Dr. Ulf Linderfalk is a Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden. The first part of his comments can be found here.] In what sense does the VCLT give a description of the way to understand a treaty? The way Julian describes prevailing legal doctrine, the presumption against preparatory work is effectuated “by a set of threshold restrictions that...

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05 Feb

[Dr. Ulf Linderfalk is a Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden.] Julian’s article focuses on a single proposition (p. 780)
“[W]hen an interpreter thinks a text [of a treaty] is fairly clear and produces results that are not manifestly unreasonable or absurd, she ought to give that prima facie reading preclusive effect over anything the travaux [préparatoires] might suggest to the contrary.”
Specifically, Julian argues (p. 781), that this proposition – while today shared by an overwhelming majority of international judiciaries and legal scholars – “cannot be reconciled with the agreement actually reached in 1969” and embodied by Articles 31 and 32 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). In critically assessing Mortenson’s article, I find that it builds on three assumptions:
  • In the final analysis, the legally correct meaning of a treaty is determined by the intention of its parties. Thus, when interpreting a treaty, the ultimate purpose is to find out how the original parties to the treaty actually intended it to be understood.
  • Articles 31 and 32 of the VCLT guide interpreters to discovering the common intention of treaty parties. Thus, ordinary meaning, context, preparatory work, and other means of interpretation help interpreters understand the legally correct meaning of a treaty.
  • A detailed analysis of the preparatory work of the Vienna Convention is an appropriate method for a scholarly analysis of the legally correct meaning of Articles 31 and 32 of the VCLT.
As I will explain in my two posts for this Symposium, I think all three of Julian’s assumptions are either fundamentally flawed or seriously debatable. Readers with a particular interest in issues of treaty interpretation might want to consult the slightly more elaborate working paper that I have recently posted on the SSRN.
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05 Feb

[Julian Davis Mortenson is Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan Law] It is often asserted that the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties relegates drafting history to a rigidly subsidiary role in treaty interpretation. Many commentators go so far as to suggest that the VCLT entrenches a categorical prejudice against travaux préparatoires—the preparatory work of negotiation, discussions, and drafting that...

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04 Feb

[Karen J. Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University, and Jacqueline McAllister is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College (as of July 2014).] Many thanks to Solomon Ebobrah, Kofi Kufuor, and Horace Adjolohoun for their challenging and insightful comments our AJIL article, A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa. We are pleased to have provoked a debate about the drivers of legal integration in Africa and to see this debate linked to a larger set of literatures.  We hope that this symposium will encourage others to investigate the forces that have shaped regional integration projects around the world and to use evidence from ECOWAS to inform regional integration theory in general. Our article attempts to stay on firm empirical ground and to generate as complete and accurate an account of the ECOWAS Court’s transformation as one can have at this moment in time.  But here is the rub—what does it mean to say “at this moment of time?” There were many questions that we could not answer in research conducted only a few years after the events in question. For example, we did not interview the member state officials who debated the expansion of the Court’s jurisdiction.  This was in part due to a lack of time and money, but also because doing so was unlikely to yield different or more complete information.  The decision to extend the Court’s jurisdiction is recent and still contested.  This makes it tricky to interview participants, whose answers may be colored by or speak to the sentiments of the day. Someday, African scholars may write a version of the recent book The Classics of EU Law Revisited, which examines foundational ECJ rulings fifty years later. The passage of time allowed EU historians to access personal archives and analyze the views of key individuals, and thereby reconstruct what happened before, during, and after these rulings.  We look forward to the day that our account of the ECOWAS Court is similarly dissected.  For now, here are our tentative answers to some of the questions raised in this symposium.
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04 Feb

[Dr. Horace S. Adjolohoun is a Senior Legal Expert at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. He recently completed his LLD thesis on Giving Effect to the Human Rights Jurisprudence of the ECOWAS Court of Justice: Compliance and Influence at the University of Pretoria.] I agree with Alter, Helfer and McAllister that progressive judicial lawmaking may be risky, particularly in an environment where domestic politics are not in favor of a supranational court that limits the sovereignty margin of state organs. In the context of the ECOWAS Court of Justice (ECCJ), an interesting question could therefore be whether, by a purposive adjudication, the Court could read community law through its human rights mandate. The Court has repeatedly given a negative answer, and many have warned of the related risks, particular bearing in mind the fall of the SADC Tribunal. An association of factors makes me suggest that the chance could be worth taking. The ECCJ is the official judicial body in which ECOWAS has vested the mandate to oversee the interpretation and application of norms adopted under the aegis of the Community (‘original’ Community law). I suggest that the African Charter has acquired the status of Community law because of its 'constructive' incorporation in ECOWAS instruments, particularly the 1993 Revised Treaty and the 2001 Governance Protocol. On the basis of the 2005 Court Protocol, the ECCJ has confirmed that status through its successive human rights judgments, starting from the first one in 2005. Article 31(1) VCLTTreaty law commands that interpretation of conventions should follow the ordinary meaning and not expand beyond the initial intention of the parties. Particularly, in the framework of regional integration arrangements, the ‘agency’ doctrine suggests that the Agent (here the ECCJ) may not usurp legislative functions by either interpreting the silence of the law in a particular direction (which I argue the ECCJ did in the Ugokwe case) or – and thereby – generating new norms that were not expressly formulated by law-makers (here, state parties)  (see Stone Sweet, 10-15). Some of the authors of the lead article support that approach in a previous work. I agree that the silence of the 2005 Protocol regarding the well established international customary law rule of exhaustion of domestic remedies is as plain as was the lack of direct access for private litigants in the Afolabi era. Despite this, the ECCJ’s judges espoused purposive – and, in my view, ‘progressive’ – judicial lawmaking regarding exhaustion. The ECOWAS human rights ‘regime’ borrows from the African Charter-based system, which poses seven admissibility requirements for complaints to be accepted by the African Court and Commission. In the practice of the Commission, the rule of exhaustion is by far the one that attracts more contention. The 2005 ECCJ Protocol provides for ‘non-anonymity’ and ‘non-pendency’ as the two admissibility conditions. From the foregoing, it is surprising that, in the course of lawmaking, ECOWAS states provided expressly for two ‘minor’ conditions, and remained silent for a ‘major’ condition, which has always attracted dispute.
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03 Feb

[Dr. Kofi Oteng Kufuor is a Professor at the University of East London, UK.] In November 2013 the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice threw out a case brought before it by Nigerian traders seeking a judgment that Ghana’s investment legislation which discriminated against ECOWAS nationals was inconsistent with ECOWAS law. The decision by the Court was surprising not only on account of it being a setback to the ECOWAS goals of a single economic market but it was also a blow to the supranational regime that the members created with the adoption of the Revised ECOWAS Treaty. Moreover, this decision was even more astonishing as it went against ECOWAS law and related protocols on the free movement of persons, right of residence and establishment. The decision was also surprising in the wake of the efforts by the Court, carefully outlined in the paper “A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice" by Alter, Helfer and McAllister (AHM), to extend its power. The research by AHM states that in the early stages of the Court’s power grab, economic union was sacrificed for the protection of human rights. At the core of the paper by AHM is that a constellation of actors, driven by a variety of interests, came together at a critical juncture in ECOWAS politics – there was widespread concern about the respect for human rights and humanitarian law - and this meeting of persons and policy space created an opportunity for the Court to expand its reach into the realm of human rights. However, if we accept the core arguments of public choice theory then the Court could have exploited the petition before it to seize more power for itself. Thus public choice theorists studying international organizations will be surprised to see that this supranational moment has slipped especially with regard to an organization that still has compliance and legitimacy problems. AHM assert that the decision to allow private interests to bring human rights suits before the ECOWAS Court was done at the expense of the Court serving as an engine for realizing the economic integration objective. The inference from this is that while a critical juncture appeared and thus an opportunity seized in the name of human rights, a similar opportunity is yet to come into existence for economic interests. However, looking at the rejection of the traders’ suit from a non-economic “irrational” point of view, the ECOWAS Court has struck a blow for re-connecting markets to society by abating neoliberal economic openness that subordinate Ghana’s investment law to ECOWAS law. Was the Court able to do so because the kind of interests that birthed the Court’s rights moment did not exist at the regional level? Inferred from AHM’s work the answer seems to be yes.
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03 Feb

[Dr. Solomon T. Ebobrah is a Senior Lecturer at Niger Delta University.]

To date, ‘A new International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice’ authored by Karen Alter, Larry Helfer and Jacqueline McAllister is arguably the most eloquent scholarly exposition on the human rights jurisdiction of the ECOWAS Court of Justice (ECCJ) by observers from outside the African continent. This brilliant piece of work is to my knowledge, also the only one yet in existence to have taken a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the ECCJ. Based on their very thorough and painstaking empirical investigation, the authors have successfully (in my view) supplied answers to some of the nagging questions that political scientists and lawyers would have regarding the budding human rights mandate of the ECCJ. As they point out in their opening remarks, intrigued (as the rest of us are) by the sharp but successful redeployment of the ECCJ from its original objectives of providing support economic integration to a seemingly more popular but secondary role as an international human rights court, the authors apply this article for the purpose trying understand and explain the rationale and manner of this transformation.

The authors have made very compelling arguments in support of their theoretical claim that international institutions, including international courts adapt to changing norms and societal pressures such that rational functionalist goals do not exclusively determine how a given international institution ultimately turns after its creation. While I find myself in agreement with much of the article, it is in relation to this claim and the evidence supplied by the authors in proof thereof that I find my first challenge.

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03 Feb

[Karen J. Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University, and Jacqueline McAllister is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College (as of July 2014).] The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice is an increasingly active and surprisingly bold adjudicator of human rights cases.  Since acquiring a human rights jurisdiction in 2005, the ECOWAS Court has issued more than 50 decisions relating to alleged rights violations by 15 West African states. The Court’s path-breaking cases include judgments against Niger for condoning modern forms of slavery, against Nigeria for impeding the right to free basic education for children, and against the Gambia for the torture of dissident journalists. A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, recently published in AJIL, explains how a sub-regional tribunal first established to help build a common market was later redeployed as a human rights court.  We investigate why West African governments—which set up the Court in a way that has allowed persistent flouting of ECOWAS economic rules—later delegated to ECOWAS judges a remarkably expansive human rights jurisdiction over suits filed by individuals and NGOs. Our theoretical contribution explains how international institutions, including courts, evolve over time in response to political contestation and societal pressures.  We show how humanitarian interventions in West Africa in the 1990s created a demand to expand ECOWAS’s security and human rights mandates.  These events, in turn, triggered a cascade of smaller reforms in the Community that, in the mid-2000s, created an opening for an alliance of civil society groups and supranational actors to mobilize in favor of court reform. The creation of a human rights court in West Africa may surprise many readers of this blog. Readers mostly familiar with global bodies like the ICJ, the WTO and the ICC, or regional bodies in Europe and the Americas, may be unaware that Africa also has active international courts that litigate important cases.  Given that ECOWAS’ primary mandate is to promote economic integration, we wanted to understand why its court exercises such far-reaching human rights jurisdiction.  Given that several ECOWAS member states have yet to accept the jurisdiction of the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights, the ECOWAS Court’s ability to entertain private litigant complaints—without first requiring the exhaustion of domestic remedies—is especially surprising.  We also expected that even if ECOWAS member states decided to create such a tribunal, they would have included robust political checks to control the judges and their rulings. What we found—based on a review of ECOWAS Court decisions and more than two dozen interviews with judges, Community officers, government officials, attorneys, and NGOs—was quite different.  The member states not only gave Court a capacious human rights jurisdiction, they also rejected opportunities to narrow the Court’s authority. Our AJIL article emphasizes several interesting dimensions of the ECOWAS Court’s repurposing and subsequent survival as an international human rights tribunal.
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