Reservations to United Nations human rights treaties : is half a loaf better than no bread?

Abstract

Much of the enormous volume of literature on the law of reservations has been concerned with human rights treaties. This is not surprising given the centrality of the International Court of Justice's Advisory Opinion on, Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to the law of reservations and the sense that human rights objectives are not served by the current law of reservations. The concerns raised in this literature include the failure of the law to protect the rights expressed in the treaties from the undermining effect of reservations that are "incompatible" or otherwise invalid. In particular, concern about certain reservations made to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the Women's Convention), to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Children's Convention) and to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR or Covenant), has prompted considerable discussion of the issue of the application of the law of reservations to all human rights treaties.