Book Symposium: Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals

Author Richard Gardiner is Visiting Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London. His main areas of interest are public international law, air law, intellectual property.

Daniel Peat’s excellent study Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals covers important issues in the interpretation of treaties. Its examination of how certain international courts and tribunals have used domestic law and principles or concepts derived from domestic law in reasoning leading to interpretation of treaties provides a useful stimulus to consideration of such materials in treaty interpretation. While the book is about interpretation on the international plane, it will also furnish guidance for courts within national systems. Such courts are increasingly encountering legal issues arising from treaties, as treaties come to provide new rules to be given effect within the law of states parties to them, harmonize laws, and provide rules on jurisdiction.

One issue, which is considered in the early part of the book, is how use of reasoning from domestic laws fits with the provisions of interpretation in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (‘the Vienna rules’). The flexibility and wide scope of these rules for the discretion of the interpreter has not always been well understood. The book suggests that the Vienna rules ‘set the outer limits of the interpretative enquiry by prescribing the materials that should be taken into account by the interpreter, where those materials are present’ (p 21). While this is explained as meaning that the rules do not give a framework against which it can be judged whether an interpretation is ‘correct’, the Vienna rules are not generally limiting. They provide the essential minimum of identifiable materials or interpretative elements, some indicators of a method, and a springboard or necessary starting point for interpretation of a treaty.

The ‘open’ character of the rules, which is clear from their content and formulation, can also be shown by the way the International Law Commission treated the so-called canons or maxims often expressed by their Latin tags (expressio unius, eiusdem generis etc). Not readily reducible to firm principles (and hence to ‘rules’), these were not included in the draft or final Vienna rules. This was not because they were never to be used, but rather because circumstances for their deployment were too variable and they were only, for the most part, to be regarded as principles of logic and good sense rather than principles constituting rules. (They are exhaustively studied in another recent book: Klingler et al (Eds). Between the Lines of the Vienna Convention? Canons and Other Principles of Interpretation in Public International Law, Kluwer, 2019).

It could reasonably be said that in the right circumstances, use of domestic laws can fulfil a similar role. Where not indicative of practice pursuant to a treaty to show an agreed interpretation (which is already covered by the rules), use of domestic laws may clarify the selection of the appropriate ordinary meaning of terms used or act as supplementary means of interpretation. ‘Supplementary’ means envisaged by the Vienna rules are just that. They supplement the general rule by adding to it or make good any lack of effectiveness in that rule. ‘Supplementary’ means are not exclusively preparatory work and the circumstances of conclusion of a treaty, and are not properly viewed as invariably subordinate to the general rule. This is clearly shown by the fact that recourse to them can be determinative when the prescribed criteria (ambiguity, obscurity etc) apply. ‘Determining’ the meaning is the very antithesis of acting in a subordinate role, which is the reason for prescribing gateways for use of supplementary means for this purpose. Other use of supplementary means is as an adjunct to the general rule in confirming a meaning achieved by its application.

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