Treaties

3 Key excerpts on "Treaties"

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  eBook - ePub

  Bridges Over Water

  Understanding Transboundary Water Conflict, Negotiation and Cooperation

  • Ariel Dinar, Shlomi Dinar, Stephen McCaffrey, Daene McKinney(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • WSPC

    (Publisher)

  9. AN OVERVIEW OF SELECTED INTERNATIONAL WATER Treaties IN THEIR GEOGRAPHIC AND POLITICAL CONTEXTS

  Objectives

  This chapter focuses on legal traits of Treaties and the interaction between political and geographic context of the transboundary basins on the nature of the Treaties signed between their riparians. You will have a clear understanding of what treaty is, what the treaty components are, and how states have used Treaties to deal with allocation and management issues in a variety of political and geographical settings. You will also be familiarized with the post-treaty arrangements such as the frequently established joint commissions to facilitate states’ cooperation with regard to shared freshwater resources, and the mechanisms that can be used to permit a treaty to evolve to suit changed conditions or unforeseen problems.

  Main Terminology

  Bilateral treaty; Contiguous watercourse; Framework agreement; Limitrophe section of a river; Multilateral treaty; Run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plant; Specific watercourse agreement; Successive watercourse; Treaty.

  The treaty is a cornerstone of the relations between the countries of the world. It is an agreement between countries creating binding legal obligations. It would not be impossible for them to coexist without Treaties but it would be difficult. Chapter 3 contains an overview of the international legal system. As we saw there, the two main sources of international law are Treaties and customary international law. The present chapter focuses on Treaties. It should be borne in mind, however, that even if a particular question is governed by a treaty, customary international law may still come into play in filling gaps in the treaty

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  eBook - ePub

  Inter-Republican Co-operation of the Russian Republic

  • Anwara Begum(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The RSFSR signed different kinds of agreements with the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Some of them were cultural, some economic, some on coordinating foreign relations of the republics with those of Russia, and some were on basic principles of inter-state relations. The cultural agreements were about facilitating cultural relations, the economic ones typically dealt with maintenance of supplies. The most important agreements were the ones which dealt with the bases of inter-state relations. They were so because they chalked out the nature of relations between the signing parties. They also formed the source of later agreements. These Treaties are the focus of this chapter.

  There are important reasons for narrowing the focus of the study to an analysis of these core Treaties. These Treaties were the basic and fundamental ones. The others either emanated from them or were peripheral because they dealt with much less important issues as stop gap measures. Being the core of the set of written agreements they would better capture the attitudes of the Russian policy makers. Other agreements will be drawn upon in the process of analysis as supplementary evidence. The other reason relates to the issue of feasibility. Treaties are special legal documents interpretation of which is governed by particular rules developed by international legal scholars and the Vienna Convention on the Laws of Treaties, 1969. Their analysis thus prove to be detailed, complex and laborious, making it often impossible to manage the analysis of one or a few Treaties at a time.

  Some facts about the Treaties

  Russia signed at least forty agreements and Treaties with the republics. In classifying these agreements Russia followed the Soviet legal tradition. Agreements were those documents which dealt with less important issues and were typically signed by the members of the Council of Ministers depending upon the nature of the agreements. The education agreement with Armenia, for instance, was signed by the deputy education minister and the economic agreements were signed by Prime Minister Silaev. The agreements on the principles of inter-state relations were signed by the chair of the Supreme Soviet and after the June 1991 RSFSR presidential election, the president. The same was true of the former Soviet Union where less important agreements were called agreements and signed by ministers and peace Treaties or Treaties of friendship were signed by the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (Triska and Slusser, 1962, chapter 3

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  eBook - ePub

  Law Among Nations

  An Introduction to Public International Law

  • James Larry Taulbee, Gerhard von Glahn(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  53 Such an interpretation seeks to construe dubious passages or terms in their context—a principle one can find little to quarrel with.

  Historical Interpretation

  Courts have occasionally applied a historical interpretation to certain Treaties, although this method requires considerable caution in its application. As long as a court restricts itself in this sphere to an examination of records concerned with negotiation of the agreement and related documents (travaux préparatoires, or preparatory work and discussions), the historical approach to interpretation appears quite reasonable. But once a court accepts previous history (historical relations among the parties, for example), it begins to tread on highly questionable ground. In this same vein, a court may examine common practice regarding the treaty that might establish a common understanding of the meaning of the terms.54

  Purpose and Function

  There is still another approach to treaty interpretation, seldom seen in practice—if all other approaches have failed to yield an acceptable result, the body resolving the dispute may focus on the function intended to be served by the treaty.55 That is, a court may attempt to interpret the instrument based on its purposes.

  Special Problems

  Effects on Third Parties

  At this point, we need to address certain special problems with the interpretation of international agreements. One of these is the effect of such instruments on third parties. Many agreements, by their positive terminology, have been clearly intended to benefit third parties. This is particularly true when a treaty contains an adhesion or accession clause, enabling third states to become parties to the instrument and to acquire by such a step a variety of legal privileges that otherwise might—or might not—have been conceded to them. On the other hand, no treaty can create legally binding obligations or rights for a third party without the latter’s consent. If that consent is stated expressly, then the third party accepts the obligation established intentionally by the treaty. A legal right is created if the parties to the treaty intend to grant that right to a third party, to a group of states that party belongs to, or to all states, but in every instance the third party must assent to the right. That assent, however, need not be expressed specifically (as in the case of a treaty-created obligation); as long as the third party does not voice an objection to the right granted, assent is assumed by the parties to the treaty.56

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