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Rohn's World Treaty Index: Its Past and Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Glenda J. Pearson
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Extract

The question of national self interest reconciled to the demands of a treaty obligation inevitably calls upon a different level ofperception than pure' self-interest, outside such a system, invites.

Maxwell Cohen

The World Treaty Index (WTI), first published in print form in 1974, has been a mainstay of treaty research for over a quarter of a century. A second edition was published in 1983 and a reprint of that edition appeared in 1997. Both editions of the print multi-volume set can be found in almost all major law libraries and in research institutes with an interest in international relations, area studies and globalization. The WTI lives on in electronic form and remains to this day the largest collection of treaty citations in the world, with well over 60,000 entries to date. Over the last decade, interdisciplinary scholarly research interests have increasingly focused on the kinds of information that can be extracted from The World Treaty Index.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Legal Information , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , Winter 2001 , pp. 543 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the International Association of Law Libraries 

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References

1 Cohen, Maxwell, “Impartiality, Realism and the International Process,” in International Law at a Time of Perplexity; Essays in Honour of Shabtai Rosenne. Yoram Dinstein, ed. (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1989), 91.Google Scholar

2 For Rohn's own description of this early history of the World Treaty Index, see his “Institutionalism in the Law of Treaties: A Case of Combining Teaching and Research,” Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting, Washington D.C. (April 22–24, 1965), p. 93–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Cohen, Maxwell, “The United Nations Treaty Project,” International Studies Quarterly, 12, no 2 (1968): 174–195.Google Scholar

4 Cohen, Maxwell, World Treaty Index, Vol. 1, Introduction and Main Entry Section (Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio Inc., 1974), x. Google Scholar

5 Article 102, United Nations Charter states:Google Scholar

1. Every treaty and every international agreement entered into by any Member of the United Nations after the present Charter comes into force shall as soon as possible be registered with the Secretariat and published by it.Google Scholar

2. No party to any such treaty or international agreement which has not been registered in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 1 of this Article may invoke that treaty or agreement before any organ of the United Nations.Google Scholar

6 The current and most complete version of the treaty data is in electronic form and for the purposes of this article will be referred to as World Treaty Index Database, thus distinguishing it from the printed editions of the WTI. This electronic database is currently composed primarily of a set of Access tables and not publicly available, but can be utilized through mediated search requests. A beta test subset of the index is publicly available at http://www.lib.washington.edu/dbtw-wpd/wti/wtdb.htm The retrieval software used at this site is InMagic, a temporary and not totally satisfactory solution for moving the database to the worldwide web.Google Scholar

7 United Nations, Millennium Summit Multilateral Treaty Framework: An Invitation to Universal Participation (New York: United Nations Reproduction Section, 2000), ix. Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 93–111.Google Scholar

9 Henkin, Louis, “The Future of International Law.” International Law; Classic and Contemporary Readings (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 553. First published in International Law: Politics and Values (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff Publishers, 1995).Google Scholar

10 Buergenthal, Thomas and Maier, Harold G., Public International Law in a Nutshell, 2nd edition (St.Paul, MN: West Group, 1990), 2.Google Scholar

11 Rohn, Peter H., World Treaty Index, Vol. 1, Reference Volume, 2nd edition (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, Inc. 1983), 6.Google Scholar

12 “United Nations Treaty Collection.” [http://untreaty.un.org/]. August 2001.Google Scholar

13 Fleischhauer, Carl-August, “The United Nations Treaty Series,” in International Law at a Time of Perplexity; Essays in Honour of Shabtai Rosenne. Yoram Dinstein, ed. (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989), 138.Google Scholar

14 Rohn, , World Treaty Index, 2nd edition, 7.Google Scholar

15 Cass, Deborah Z., “The ‘Constitutionalization of International Trade Laws; Judicial Norm-Generation as the Engine of Constitutional Development in International Trade,” European Journal of International Law 12, no. 1 (2001): 39–76. As an aside, a look at the home page for WTO/GATT at http://gatt.org/ on August 14, 2001 gives a good example of both the widening level of participatory groups operating at a global level beyond just sovereign states, and the effort on the part of the WTO to respond to continued charges of elitism, with a call to 647 nongovernmental organizations to participate in the 4th WTO Ministerial Conference. While there is much more to this invitation than meets the eye, the offer was made.Google Scholar

16 Bodansky, Daniel, “The Legitimacy of International Governance: a Coming Challenge for Environmental Law?” American Journal of International Law 93, no. 3 (1999): 596–624.Google Scholar

17 Jacobson, Harold K. and Weiss, Edith Brown, “Strengthening Compliance with International Environmental Accords: Preliminary Observations from a Collaborative Project,” International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 180. Reprinted from Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 1, no. 2 (1995).Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 181.Google Scholar

19 Perhaps the most compelling and complex area of treaty research lies in the struggle for universal human rights. Relativists argue the impossibility of identifying and applying a single standard to all the peoples of the world. But scholarship in support of the universality of basic life values is far more convincing in this author's view. Several works have taken a second look at the historical development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and found that, indeed, the roots of the declaration are truly global: An-Na'im, Abdullahi Ahmed, ed., Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives; a Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Galtung, Johan, Human Rights in Another Key (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994); Diemer, Alwin [et al.], The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Paris: UNESCO, 1986); Korey, William, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; A Curious Grapevine (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998); Morsink, Johannes, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Glendon, Mary Ann, A World Made New; Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). Waltz, Susan, in her article “Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 23 (2001): 44–72, lays out in detail the contributions of the small states in crafting the UDHR. In fact, “A wide range of participants outside the Western bloc made significant contributions to the construction of the most elemental international standard of human rights, and they were aware at the time of the significance of their words and deeds.” (50) Furthermore, “…the Great Powers did not advance the idea [of universal human rights]. Once it was loose, their concern was to manage the process and ensure at least that the results did not run counter to their interests.” (52)Google Scholar

20 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Paris 1948), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (New York, 1966, entered into force January 3, 1976), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (New York 1966, entered into force March 23, 1976), along with over 250 specific treaties on subjects ranging from slavery to education. See the University of Minnesota web site “Human Rights Library, Human Rights Treaties and Other Instruments” at [http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/treaties.htm] for a well organized and well maintained listing of human rights agreements in full text.Google Scholar

21 The credit for creating a web-accessible prototype goes to Research Assistant Lisa Spagnolo who designed the web interface, created the documentation and instruction guidelines, puzzled through computer files and sorted out a number of mysteries that accrue naturally with any legacy project of several decades duration. She was greatly assisted by Libraries Systems Intern Jennifer Ward who provided us with the initial working sample of the index in InMagic.Google Scholar

22 Rosenne, Shabtai, “Treaty Index,” 31 May 2001, personal email (31 May 2001).Google Scholar