This is a good news book for those who care about the development of international law into an effective, supervised and enforceable legal system. It contains authoritative and clearly organised research into the implementation of treaties in three areas, chosen because they are at the forefront of the modern development of international law, from self-contained co-existence to active co-operation among States.

The three chosen areas also have in common the idea that some of the traditional enforcement procedures designed to remedy the material breach of a treaty such as suspension, counter-measures or even reparations are of limited use, because the central objective is the protection of collective interests rather than balanced or reciprocal grant of privileges to the States Parties. As this analysis demonstrates, what is happening instead involves putting in place and actively applying a wide range of techniques including information dissemination, inspection of performance of obligations, collective review by the Parties, assistance with practical difficulties, judicial settlement of disputes, political incentives and penalties. The particular mechanisms agreed for each treaty and selected for use in case of non-compliance are tailored to the objective of that treaty and to the context in which non-compliance is suspected. This is summed up in the expression ‘active treaty management’ advocated by Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes in their 1995 book The New Sovereignty.

Each of the three editors presents a general introduction to one of the three selected areas—Andreas Zimmermann for Part I on International Human Rights, Geir Ulfstein for Part II on International Environmental Law and Thilo Marauhn for Part III on International Arms Control. The compliance control and enforcement provisions in three or four individual treaties within each area are then separately described, critically analyzed and evaluated by experts working on the practical application of the relevant treaty regime. The authors examine how the differing approaches have been formulated and refined in the light of the operation of the regime and of other treaties in the same area and assess the overall level of compliance with the rules of the treaty. They consider the role played by private individuals and non-governmental organisations, something which may be important where States Parties have limited interest in or are reluctant to pursue complaints at the inter-governmental level. Some of the treaties chosen—such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)—have long-established compliance regimes which may be evaluated in the light of several decades of practice. Others—such as the Convention on Access to Information, public participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention)—have entered into force quite recently so that the interest lies mainly in seeing how enforcement procedures from other treaties have been adapted to novel types of international obligations. Within each area there is assessment of the importance of the political will of the States concluding and managing each treaty—which is, for example, seen as the reason why the highly successful compliance and enforcement regime of the European Convention on Human Rights has not been more widely copied in more recent treaties on human rights such as the UN Convention Against Torture.

With multilateral agreements on environmental questions, it is shown that although there remains a role for classical dispute settlement, a judicial solution or counter-measures may not provide an appropriate solution for multilateral problems. With CITES, however, experience has shown that the threat or use of trade sanctions has led recalcitrant States to seek technical assistance so as to improve their capacity to enforce the regime—a combination of stick and carrot which, it is suggested by the authors, should be applied more widely as a model.

The interplay of positive and negative incentives is also examined in the context of arms control agreements. Although the traditional focus of such treaties has been on the prevention of conflict and the limitation of damage where conflict occurs, confidence building among States and the limitation of unnecessary expenditure are now major factors. It is stressed that the entry into force of an arms control treaty should be seen as the beginning rather than the end of the matter—moreover, the test of success is not only compliance but the perception by both sides of compliance by the other. It follows that for these treaties verification is of central importance even though it is particularly sensitive. Institutional inspectors are the best guarantee of objectivity and confidentiality. There are peculiar difficulties such as the proliferation of weapons outside state control—private security firms and terrorists among others. Counter-measures are perceived as particularly inappropriate unless authorised by the UN Security Council. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons among those studies has the longest history of increasingly systematic and intrusive inspection. Some good examples are given of the use of varied sticks and carrots to ensure compliance with this treaty, although there might also have been mention of the deployment of carrots which secured the de-commissioning or removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan and their accession to the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon States (a status confirmed by International Atomic Energy Agency inspections). The work of the IAEA and its Director General in strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime was acknowledged as being ‘of incalculable importance’ by the Committee which in 2005 awarded them the Nobel Peace Prize.

This outstanding book concludes with three analytical chapters which separately appraise dispute settlement, compliance control and enforcement across the three selected areas and draw general conclusions which also link to innovative features in the International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility. As emphasised in the final chapter, the various contributions bring out the complexity and sophistication of modern treaty regimes aimed at securing observance of rules of international law.