Review Of The United Nations International Law Commission On Reservations To Treaties On Human Rights Achievements

Questions relating to reservations to human rights treaties have been on the agenda of international law for quite some time. The latest work on this topic is the Guide to Practice drafted by the Special Rapporteur, Mr. Alain Pellet. Therefore this article comprehensively introduced the second and tenth report submitted by Mr. Alain Pellet, and analyzed his achievement and inconsistency with regard to the following three issues thereof: (1) Does the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 apply to the human rights treaties?; (2) What's the object and purpose of a treaty, especially human rights treaty?; (3) Who is competent to determine the compatibility of a reservation? Mr. Alain Pellet did a valuable research on reservation to human rights treaties, but sometimes the reasoning was self-contradictory. This writer insists that the resolution of the problem relies on the improvement of both international human rights law and international law of treaties, and that the concept of"object and purpose"shall not be unreasonably extended, otherwise the principle of object and purpose may not be a effective way of restrict the formulation of reservations to human rights treaties.