The withdrawal of reservations under uniform private law conventions

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, adopted at Vienna on 11 April 1980 (CISG) and generally recognized as one of the most successful uniform private law conventions ever adopted, recently saw the accession of its eighty-third Contracting State, Guyana.1 In joining the CISG, Guyana followed the example of most new CISG Contracting States by not using any of the reservations authorized in Articles 92–96 of the Convention but, rather, undertaking to apply the Convention in its entirety. In contrast to this general trend, accessions to the CISG during earlier years were more often accompanied by reservations.2 According to the definition in Article 2(1)(d) of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT),3 ‘reservation’ means a unilateral statement, however phrased or named, made by a State, when signing, ratifying, accepting, approving, or acceding to a treaty, whereby it purports to exclude or to modify the legal effect of certain provisions of the treaty in their application to that State. The CISG expressly authorizes not less than five reservations in its Articles 92–964 (if one counts the so-called ‘federal state clause’ in Article 93, which may or may not qualify as a reservation stricto sensu5). Employed as a tool of compromise where agreement about the uniform law text may otherwise not have been reached among the States’ delegations involved in the drafting process,6 reservations have long been viewed as a regrettable-but-necessary evil in international uniform private law-making.7 On the CISG’s twenty-fifth birthday on 11 April 2005, 21 of the then 65 Contracting States (or 32 per cent) had declared one or more reservations, among them some of the largest States (such as China, Russia, and the USA).