Latin America and the Caribbean in the International System by G. Pope Atkins

Author:G. Pope Atkins [Atkins, G. Pope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Latin America
ISBN: 9780813333830
Google: _Ow0ngEACAAJ
Goodreads: 1287038
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1998-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Inter-American Policies

Codification of International Law

The Inter-American System first addressed the codification of international law at the Second International Conference (1901–1902).10 The delegates signed a convention for that purpose, but only three states ratified it. The United States opposed the codification of an inter-American law at the time and for many years thereafter, reiterating its preference for global international law. The Third International Conference (1906) established the International Commission of Jurists to draft codes of international law, but the project moved slowly. Alejandro Alvarez, an eminent Chilean jurist, was the leading advocate of juridical Pan Americanism. He developed the idea of separating inter-American from general international law, considering the former the legal extension of Pan Americanism. Beginning in 1905 Alvarez advanced the idea that “because of geographical, ethnological, historical, social, political, economic, moral, and spiritual reasons the states of the New World were developing an American international law which supplemented existing international law and would eventually lead the way in molding the future of nations.”11

As head of the International Commission of Jurists, Alvarez supervised a project drafting a separate code of inter-American law, submitting a report on it in 1923 to the Fifth International Conference. Alvarez led the International Commission after it was reestablished in 1923; it submitted twelve draft conventions on public international law to the Sixth International Conference (1928), which adopted seven of them.

Between 1928 and 1938, the process of creating and reorganizing the large number of codification agencies and revising their highly complicated procedures eclipsed codification itself. With the outbreak of European war in 1939, the meetings of the existing agencies were indefinitely postponed. The Inter-American Neutrality Committee was created to formulate recommendations for legal actions by individual governments related to neutrality; in the process it also dealt with some elements of codification. In 1942 the committee was reconstituted as the Inter-American Juridical Committee and charged with “the formulation of specific recommendations relative to the international organization in the juridical and political fields, and in the field of international security.” It was an active body during World War II.

In 1948 the Juridical Committee submitted draft conventions to the Ninth International Conference. The conference used them as the bases for the American Treaty on Pacific Settlement, the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, and the Inter-American Charter of Social Guarantees.

The 1948 OAS Charter reformed the unwieldy codification process. It created the Inter-American Council of Jurists as one of three organs under the Council of the OAS, with the purpose of promoting codification of public and private international law, and it made the Juridical Committee a subordinate agency of the Council of Jurists. The council and the committee were active in preparing studies relating to legal considerations of the Alliance for Progress. The 1967 Protocol of Buenos Aires reconstituted the Inter-American Juridical Committee as one of the principal organs “to serve the Organization as an advisory body on juridical matters.” Since then it has drafted a broad array of instruments of private and public international law, many of which the OAS has adopted.

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