Handbook on Good Treaty Practice

Jill Barrett is Visiting Reader in the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London and Associate Member, 6 Pump Court Chambers. She also works independently as an international law consultant and advises UK parliamentary committee inquiries on the role of Parliament in scrutinising treaties. Previously, she was the Arthur Watts Senior Research Fellow in Public International Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and, before that, she was Legal Counsellor at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Throughout her twenty-year FCO career she negotiated, drafted and advised on numerous treaties and represented the UK at the United Nations and international conferences. She led the UK Government's work on creating a statutory regime on ratification of treaties in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. She supervised the FCO Treaty Section and developed new ways of delivering treaty services to the UK Government and the public. Robert Beckman is the Head of the Ocean Law and Policy programme and the former Director of the Centre for International Law (CIL), National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also an Associate Professor at the NUS Faculty of Law, where he has taught for more than thirty years on Public International Law, UN Law, and Ocean Law and Policy. He co-authored Promoting Compliance: The Role of Dispute Settlement and Compliance Mechanisms in ASEAN Instruments (2016) which looked into hundreds of ASEAN instruments to dissect the ASEAN treaty practice in promoting and encouraging domestic compliance. He is an expert on the issues of law of the sea in Southeast Asia, including maritime security, piracy, governance of submarine cables, and the South China Sea disputes. He has co-directed the special project on treaty law and practice at CIL since 2012.

• 1. Introduction to good treaty practice; 2. Organising treaty work in governments and international organisations; 3. Treaties and other kinds of international instruments; 4. Managing and using treaty collections; 5. Making a new treaty (negotiation, drafting, production); 6. Preparing to become party to a treaty; 7. Becoming party to a treaty – consent to be bound and entry into force; 8. Continuing engagement with the treaty throughout its life; 9. Ending treaty relations; 10. Future of treaty practice.

'This Handbook is a collaborative effort by the authors to identify, through engagement with various stakeholders, the best practices in treaty-making. It is a comprehensive guide providing expertise on each stage of a treaty's lifespan including, reservation, ratification, amendments, etc. It condenses highly technical information into an accessible framework, making it an indispensable resource, not only for treaty experts, diplomats and administrators, but also lawyers, academics and students delving into the intricacies of treaty practice.' Gabrielle Marceau, Université de Genève and the World Trade Organization Senior Counsellor