23 October 2013
Should the ILC Draft Articles be turned into a Convention?
Delegations meeting on 21 October at the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly were unable to agree on whether steps should be taken to transform the ILC Draft Articles on the Responsibility of States into a Convention.
Some delegates considered that ‘a convention would create legal certainty’ and that ‘[f]urther codification of the articles would strengthen multilateralism’, but others insisted that ‘it [was] more important to preserve the authority of the articles in practice than to codify them in a convention that may not achieve universality’ and that ‘opening them up to negotiation might upset the delicate consensus that currently existed’.
In any case, ‘virtually all delegates agreed that the draft articles were a key contribution to the development of international law and being broadly used as reference by international and national tribunals and Governments’.