This is a collection of documents on the subject of the peaceful settlement of international disputes. It is beyond serious argument that international dispute settlement occupies a central place within international law. According to the editors of the book, however, with the exception of the encyclopaedic compilation by Andreas Zimmermann and Karin Oellers-Frahm, there is no specialised document collection bringing together basic texts on dispute settlement in an accessible format. This book is an attempt to fill that gap. It divides into two parts; a general part, and one which addresses selected sectoral regimes.
The general part comprises fundamental documents, documents relating to diplomatic means, the International Court of Justice and ad hoc inter-state arbitration, particularly, the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The section covering sectoral regimes contains documents respecting human rights, law of the World Trade Organisation, investment, regional and sub-regional integration, law of the sea, environment, disarmament, arms control, non-proliferation and the aftermath of crises. In total, this book brings together some 140 documents, although in many cases it includes only their provisions respecting dispute settlement procedures. Thus this is the major source book in English devoted to peaceful settlement of international disputes in international law. Three features concerning the material compiled in this book merit highlighting, in particular.
The first feature is the breadth of the material's scope. Although the editors do not define the concept of ‘international disputes’, it is clear that the coverage of this book goes well beyond the scope of traditional inter-State disputes. For instance, various global and regional human rights treaties, and documents relating to monitoring mechanisms, are included. Arguably, mechanisms for human rights protection fall outside scope of the State-to-State disputes. To take another example, it includes documents concerning the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), namely, the ICSID Convention, the ICSID Institution Rules, and the ICSID Arbitration Rules, Additional Facility Rules and Additional Facility Arbitration Rules. These documents involve disputes between States and nationals of other States. In this sense, they differ from traditional instruments respecting inter-State disputes. Furthermore, the book covers compliance procedures set out by environmental treaties; such as the rules of procedure of the Compliance Committee of the Kyoto Protocol, the Non-compliance procedure under the Montreal Protocol, and the Guide to CITES compliance procedures. From a legal viewpoint, compliance procedures are distinct from traditional procedures for the settlement of inter-State disputes. Notably, this book also includes documents respecting inspection and verification in the context of disarmament and armed control, such as the Annex on Implementation and Verification of the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. These materials include a wide range of mechanisms and procedures which are beyond the scope of traditional means of peaceful settlement of international disputes. It can be argued that this collection reflects the diversification of means of international disputes settlement and international control.
Furthermore, the material scope of this book is wide in the sense that it includes various types of instruments which are different in nature; such as treaties, rules of procedures for international courts and tribunals, decisions and resolutions adopted by the international institutions, as well as Conferences of Parties to treaties. In particular, the development of procedural rules through the Conferences of Parties as well as treaty committees is noteworthy as a new legal phenomenon. In this regard, the editors emphasise that: “[S]ectoral regimes in areas such as international environmental law or arms control have moved beyond narrow approaches to dispute settlement and enforcement” and seek to ‘manage compliance’ through non-binding mechanisms, or decisions of Conferences and Meetings of Parties” (p. v). The book thus also reflects the diversification of the making of international law. By bringing together a wide range of binding and non-binding documents concerning a great variety of subjects, this book provides successfully a meaningful survey of dispute settlement “in its infinite variety”.
The second noteworthy feature of the work is its time span. The book covers instruments between 1794 and 2012. It commences with the 1794 Jay Treaty and includes important documents prior to World War II; such as the 1871 Treaty of Washington, the 1904 Agreement of Submission in the Dogger Bank Incident, the 1907 Hague Convention on Pacific Settlement, the 1907 Convention for the Establishment of a Central American Court of Justice, a few provisions of the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles, and the 1928 Geneva General Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes. Those documents are useful when considering the development of the mechanisms for international dispute settlement in historical perspective. Furthermore, it is of particular interest to note that the book includes documents involving the aftermath of disputes. Examples include the 1919 Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, the 1947 Treaty of Peace with Italy, the 1979 Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt, the Iran-US Claims Tribunal Framework, the settlement of mixed claims after the Second Gulf War, and the dispute settlement after the Eritrean-Ethiopian war. Considering that international dispute settlement is a continuous process, those documents deserve particular attention.
The book's third noteworthy feature concerns the method of organising the collected documents. By dividing the material into several categories, this book provides a useful roadmap in understanding a great variety of types of documents in the field of international dispute settlement. Brief notes and cross references added to documents are useful in understanding the inter-linkage between relevant instruments. This is an advantage which cannot easily be replicated on the internet. Also, the list of documents in chronological order facilitates finding a relevant document. In addition, each document is assigned a unique number (Doc no) and a related website. Even though almost all these document can be found on the internet, this document collection will not lose its importance because websites may often change and, unlike this book, they do not provide an overall picture of the development of mechanisms for peaceful settlement of international disputes. One criticism that can be made of the collection, however, is that there is no index. Nor is there any indication of the date of entry into force of treaties. Both of these would further enhance the usefulness of this collection.
Because of constraints on space and an ever-increasing number of documents, the selection of relevant documents is a highly challenging task for editors of this type of collection. Whilst Tams and Tzanakopoulos modestly state that the selection of documents and provisions within each of them is subjective (p. vi), this book assembles essential documents concerning international dispute settlement in an admirable manner. Given that it already contains 838 pages, there would seem to be little space to add more documents. Nonetheless, it is hard for a reviewer to resist the temptation to suggest some documents which could be considered for a second edition. For instance, the Covenant of the League of Nations was omitted in the first edition. Relevant provisions of the League Covenant could have been added to the collection because the practice of the League of Nations may provide lessons concerning the difficulties associated with the settlement of international disputes, in particular, non-justiciable disputes. Furthermore, the Charter of the United Nations is only partially reproduced and, thus, provisions respecting the General Assembly (Chapter IV, Articles 9 to 22) and the Security Council (Chapter V, Articles 23 to 32) are omitted. Yet both of these organs have a valuable role to play in the field of peaceful settlement of international disputes, and it might well be helpful to discuss their institutional arrangements, in particular the voting system, during a course on international law or international dispute settlement. The inter-relationship between the General Assembly and the Security Council, which is provided in Article 12 of the UN Charter, is also an issue which might usefully be discussed in the classroom. Therefore it might be useful to include relevant provisions concerning the General Assembly and the Security Council, although of course the UN Charter can easily be found in other source books.
The section covering the environment includes key documents concerning climate change, the ozone layer, trade in endangered species and the marine environment, but contains no instruments with regard to freshwater. Given that international disputes concerning the use of freshwater are becoming a matter of more pressing concern, at least one document, such as dispute settlement provisions set out in the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, might have been included. In addition, the reference to the conciliation procedure pursuant to section 1 of Part XV of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea set out in Annex V of the Convention would have enhanced the comprehensiveness of the section covering ‘Diplomatic Means’ or the 'Law of the Sea'.
This book includes five examples of optional clause declarations, namely, declarations of Uganda, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, and Nicaragua. These will be useful when discussing the jurisdiction of the ICJ in the classroom. In relation to this, it may be noted that the validity of the so-called ‘automatic’ reservations is a highly debatable issue. Hence, in addition to the above declarations, it might be useful for pedagogical purposes to include one of the declarations comprising ‘automatic’ reservations, namely, Liberia, Malawi, Mexico, Philippines and Sudan. Those are only minor suggestions for the second edition.
Overall this book is an excellent collection of documents in the field of peaceful settlement of international disputes. It is a very useful work of reference for students and scholars studying international law and international dispute settlement, as well as for practitioners working in international fields.
