 Hi, and I just want to say thank you to the conference organisers for keeping this conference running in the current circumstances. In my presentation, I'm going to talk about treaty withdrawal. First, I want to sketch a general problem that international law has had with treaty withdrawal, and I should clarify that I mean unilateral withdrawal as opposed to withdrawal by agreement. Second, I want to make some observations on the solutions arrived at in the 1969 Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties, and third to propose a way of understanding how the principle of good faith supplements the regulation of treaty withdrawal. In relation to this, I want to make three broad points. The first is that treaty withdrawal creates two problems of systemic trust in the practice of treaty making. Allowing withdrawal undermines the integrity of practice and savannah prohibiting withdrawal undermines the practical practical authority of practice and savannah. Secondly, I want to point out that the bestiality provisions see to enlarge you do find the right balance. They're neither too prohibitive nor too commissive, but they don't solve the problems entirely. Thirdly, I want to argue that good faith can and already does assist in interpreting the provisions in the VCLT or specific withdrawal provisions in particular treaties and in applying them to the facts of the case. And I won't say the way in which it does so is by providing a degree of flexibility in interpretation and application that enables international law to balance the competing problems of integrity and authority as they arise in circumstances. The background to this talk is obviously the fact that there have been a number of high profile treaty withdrawals in recent years, but I'm not going to talk about specific cases. These may create problems for specific regimes, but I want to talk about the problems created international law in general by the phenomenon of treaty withdrawal, the problems it creates for the practice of treaty making. The question of treaty withdrawal raises two different problems, both of which concerned with systemic trust and treaty making. The first problem is that a practice of unilateral withdrawal might sort of trust in the binding force of treaties because compliance with one's treaty obligations becomes voluntary. Paterson, Savannah is based on the idea that states are free to determine whether to consent to treaty based legal rules, but once that consent is given, they're bound to comply with their obligations as a matter of law. And the ability of state to release itself from its obligations unilaterally would appear to undermine the obligatory force of Paterson, Savannah, or as the authors of the Harvard Draft and the Law of Treaties put it, leave Paterson, Savannah with little or no meaning. So what's the fear? It's that treaty withdrawal will destroy respect for international law and the result is that people who have this fear argue against the permissibility of withdrawal. The problem with this absolutist view on the sanctity of treaties is that it undermines their effectiveness or practical authority. Recalcitrant states, by which I mean states who have decided not to comply with their obligations, will end up breaching a treaty if they cannot withdraw from it. So by producing a situation which tends towards the flouting of the law, an absolutist approach also undermines trust in international law by making it binding in name only. It is better or so the opponents of the absolutist view argue, therefore to allow for withdrawal. And both of these views were held and debated over the first half of the 20th century, and they were debated within the International Law Commission in the drafting of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The VCLT, however, was intended to fix rules precisely in order to settle these questions. I won't go into the rules in depth, but as I'm sure everyone is aware, the VCLT allows for limited rights of withdrawal in the rules set out in articles 54 to 63 of the convention. The VCLT covers default procedures for withdrawal in article 65 to 68, and the effects of withdrawal on a state's obligations in articles 70 to 72. The VCLT rules are sort of goldilocks solution. And in my view, they strike a sensible balance. And in practice, states go on further and often include rights of unilateral withdrawal within their treaties. And so you might think that the problems are over. The provision of treaty withdrawal by international law just requires looking up the VCLT rules or express provisions in a treaty and mechanistically applying them to the facts of the case. And for the most part, I think that's true. Certain points are very clearly settled by the VCLT. For instance, material breach is in, necessity is not, but certain other points are not. And so the provisions and withdrawal provisions of particular treaties still need to be interpreted and applied, often in quite messy factual situations. One sort of a problem that's arisen in the context of recent withdrawals is how to approach domestic constitutional requirements withdrawal. And so equivalent to article 46 for treaty withdrawal. So how does that work? Or another problem is how far to the VCLT rules actually filling gaps in express withdrawal provisions, which is a problem that arose in the Whiteman case before the Court of Justice BU. So this is where I argue that good faith comes in to help regulate or more properly guide the regulation of the withdrawal process. So the first point about good faith is that it already plays this role. You can see it invoked in the WHO and Egypt's advisory opinion before the International Court of Justice, for example. Secondly, what I want to argue is that it achieves what it achieves in guiding the regulation of the withdrawal process, which is one of its main functions here, is in balancing the competing considerations of integrity and authority. I'll finish in the time I have briefly by illustrating this in the case of the Gab Chicovo Najmora project case, before the International Court of Justice. I assume that most people are familiar with the basic facts of the case, but as a quick recap, it's pretty much this. There was a treaty between Hungary and Czechoslovakia to build a dam. Hungary abandoned the project that Slovakia had become, decided to go ahead and build a different dam. Hungary complained about this and withdrew from the treaty. Then they both went off to the ICJ to sort out the rights and wrongs of it. One of the main issues was whether Hungary was entitled to withdraw, and there are two issues of good faith that arise here. There's a clean hands point on material breach. Hungary had abandoned the project first, causing the circumstances in which Slovakia breached the treaty. And so the court held that it was not therefore entitled to invoke Slovakia's breach to justify its own withdrawal. But more significantly, for my purposes, the court rejected an argument that both parties had by their conduct effectively abandoned the treaty. In doing so, it was expressly guided by the fact that such an argument would undermine the integrity of practice and savannah. However, the court was also faced with a problem of the futility of requiring the parties to actually comply with the terms of the original treaty, given the factual situation that had arisen as a result of the breaches. It was just no longer realistic to enforce the original plan as it be written. The principle of good faith to hold good faith, and I quote, implies that in this case, it is the purpose of the treaty and the intentions of the parties in concluding it, which prevail over its literal application. The principle of good faith bludges the parties to apply it in a reasonable way, and in such a manner that its purpose can be realized, end of quote. And what this entailed was negotiations between parties as to the future application of the treaty. This I would suggest is an attempt by the court to balance its decision on the continued force of the treaty with the issue of authority in the face of recalcitrance. So to conclude, good faith provides an existing mechanism for resolving issues of systemic trust and treaty withdrawal. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it can help to guide the withdrawal process in a way that balances problems of integrity and authority.