Concluding Remarks by Dire Tladi

Abstract

It is appropriate to enquire into the authority and membership of the International Law Commission as the Commission enters its seventh decade of existence. While the authority of the Commission has been a given for most of its existence, the passage of the golden years and the emergence of a new era when treaties developed by the Commission are becoming fewer, have led some to ponder whether the Commission still commands the respect and authority of yesteryear. Similarly, this new era, dominated as it is by notions of equity and equality, rightly forces us to confront the question of the composition or membership of the Commission. These two themes, the “authority” and “membership” of the Commission, as well as the interaction between the two themes, are addressed in two different, but equally fascinating ways, in the papers by Mónica Pinto and Zuzana Trávníčková. In addressing the two themes of “authority” and “membership”, both papers arrive at interesting conclusions about representation on the Commission. Particularly interesting observations were made about gender and geographic representation, generational distribution and professional representation. The two papers, presented during a panel chaired by former member of the Commission, Professor Momtaz, approached the subject of “The authority and membership of the Commission in the future”, in quite distinct ways and arrived at very different conclusions. The written papers, submitted subsequently, provide further detail explanation on the themes and conclusions advanced by the Professors Pinto and Trávníčková. In this short comment, I do not intend to respond to everything raised in these very interesting papers. I intend only to offer observations on the overarching themes and conclusions presented by the papers. In particular, while the papers cover a wide array of issues, I wish to focus only on those issues that directly touch on the two themes – authority and membership – and in particular their interaction. In the next section, the themes in the papers are explored, before some concluding remarks are made. In these concluding remarks I try to illustrate how these papers are an advert – an inadvertent campaign – for