Although the issue may have become obscured at some point after the drafting of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, it is increasingly acknowledged in international law that the goal of treaty interpretation is, as the International Law Commission’s first Special Rapporteur on the law of treaties JL Brierly put it, ‘to give effect to…

In the Policy Exchange report Clearing the Fog of Law: Saving Our Armed Forces from Defeat by Judicial Diktat, Richard Ekins, Jonathan Morgan, and Tom Tugendhat criticize the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg for not disapplying the rights of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in cases where British troops act abroad. Together the…

Jason Pobjoy explains in The Child in International Refugee Law (CUP 2017) how the rule set out in Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), the ‘general rule of interpretation’, in his words, ‘comprises a single holistic “rule” of interpretation’, and that the adoption, by the International Law Commission (ILC),…