International agreements

By international agreements it is generally meant treaties and other instruments to which states or other subjects of international law are signatory. The law of treaties which governs must of these instruments of agreement is a part of international law. Treaties may be bilateral or multilateral according to number of parties involved. They may be contractual, dealing with a specific piece of business, or they may be law-making, setting out principles or rules of future mutual conduct. Some multilateral agreements are open to all states, others are restricted or closed. Multilateral agreements which set up an intergovernmental body or an international organization are referred to as constituent agreements or instruments. The UN Charter is a multilateral, open treaty and the constituent instrument of the United Nations. Treaties such as those of Paris and Rome relating to the European Economic Community are exceptionally complex, and purely technical treaties such as the Bretton Woods agreement which set up the IMF, and the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) cannot always be interpreted and applied with unanimity. The so-called supranational treaty relates to agreements, such as those between EEC member states, which involve a partial transfer of sovereignty to an intergovernmental organization. Some fourteen different terms are used for various written instruments of international agreement which are not in treaty form. There are, in addition, oral agreements. There have been some estimated ten thousand international agreements negotiated since 1946. Despite the various mechanisms for international agreements and peaceful arbitration of disputes since 1946 the numbers of wars and of war-victims in the period is evidence of the imperfection at the international system which includes the problem of non-ratification of treaties.