Termination

In the past, major Powers made treaties to their advantage and released themselves from treaty obligations when they deemed it fit. The most widely accepted mode of terminating treaties was denunciation by one of the contracting parties.

One of the major advances made in this area in the Vienna Convention was clarification of the concept of ‘material breach’, which one of the parties could invoke as a ground for terminating the treaty or suspending its operation. Thus, under Article 60.3 such a breach consists in ‘(a) a repudiation of the treaty not sanctioned by the present Convention; or (b) the violation of a provision essential to the accomplishment of the object or purpose of the treaty’.

Provisions were also laid down to clarify the role and legal effects of withdrawal from a multilateral treaty; or termination of a bilateral treaty, upon denunciation, when the treaty does not contain any clause regarding its termination or denunciation. Article 56 provided that the treaty is not subject to termination or withdrawal unless: (a) it may be established that the parties had the intention of allowing for this possibility, or (b)’a right of denunciation or withdrawal may be implied by the nature of the treaty’.

The Convention also spelled out a cardinal principle, namely that, except for what is stipulated by Article 64, the various causes of termination do not make treaties come to an end automatically but can only be invoked by one of the parties as a ground for discounting the treaty. It was also provided hat, in addition to authorizing a party to claim that a treaty should cease, the above clauses could also have a more limited effect: that is to say, they could authorize a party to claim the mere suspension of the treaty.