The Mountain Produced a Mouse: The CSCE Meeting of Experts on Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, Valletta 1991

Abstract

From the very beginning peaceful settlement of disputes has been on the agenda of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Principle V of the first chapter of the Final Act of Helsinki of 1975 (the so-called first basket) reaffirmed the obligation of the participating states to settle their disputes by peaceful means. The Final Act, however, does not provide a mechanism through which such disputes can be resolved. The Swiss delegation had submitted in 1973 a draft-convention (called the Bindschedler-proposal after its auctor intellectualis Rudolf Bindschedler, the Legal Advisor of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs), containing a detailed system of compulsory dispute settlement. A distinction was made between judiciable and non-judiciable disputes. Judiciable disputes would be submitted to a permanent Arbitral Tribunal, non-judiciable disputes to a permanent Commission of Inquiry, Mediation and Conciliation. This proposal was, however, unacceptable to the East European states (with the exception of Romania) which had always rejected the idea of compulsory third-party dispute settlement, whereas the greaterpart of the Western states, although in principle favourable to a system of compulsory dispute settlement, had serious objections against the substance of the Swiss proposal, inter alia with regard to the rather artificial distinction between judiciable and non-judiciable disputes. The Swiss delegation did not insist on its proposal and went along with a clause in the Final Act which provided for a follow-up meeting of experts with the task “to pursue the examination and elaboration of a generally acceptable method for the peaceful settlement of disputes aimed at complementing existing methods”. It was decided that this meeting of experts was to be convened by Switzerland afterthe first follow-up meeting which was planned for 1977 in Belgrade.