Part III General and Transitory Provisions, Ch.X Signature, Ratification, Reservations, Amendments, Protocols, and Denunciation, Article 78

This chapter investigates Article 78 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR). Echoing Article 58 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the ACHR reflects the conventional freedom of the State. The Convention is one of these “free conventions,” “in the sense that no State is obliged to become a party to it.” The latter may choose to commit, but as one author points out, it does not necessarily wish to be “prisoner” of this conventional relationship. The State must also be free to leave, hence the importance of regulating this “right of exit,” in particular for reasons of legal certainty in relations between the parties. In the law of treaties, denunciation thus constitutes “the normal procedure by which a State withdraws from a treaty.” This is a unilateral mode aimed at putting an end, for the party concerned, to the treaty commitment and Article 78 of the ACHR is therefore merely an adaptation of the principle pacta sunt servanda of general international law reflected in Article 54 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), since it organizes the “consensual termination of treaty relationship” in this particular framework.