Keywords
State Succession
Law of Treaties
Vienna Convention on State Succession to Treaties
How to Cite
Abstract
The Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of Treaties had a very difficult task. It was aimed to find a balance between State’s will as the source of international obligations and the need for legal stability. Thirty years after the Vienna Convention, State’s compliance to its rules is not satisfactory. Almost worldwide, the subject remains ruled only by customary rules. Hence, to confirm the customary nature of the Convention we must examine State practice. This is the objective of the present article. To prove our argument, we begin a detailed analysis of the Convention, dividing its contents in two overlapping circles: the subject of the treaty and the type of succession concerned. The whole of the Convention is formed by rules and exceptions taken from combinations of these two circles. This article unveils that structure and then compares the Convention’s rules with State practice, following the same method and the same typologies. Our conclusion is mainly negative, because State practice does not follow Convention’s rules in cases of incorporation, separation and secession. The situation is different regarding dissolution, fusion and decolonization.
This journal is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.