ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a question that is commonly posed, but infrequently answered: what is the nature of the relationship between conventional human rights law, and general principles governing treaty law? The international law of human rights, as a subject, is almost universally understood as a distinct subdiscipline of the broader, more general, and apparently subject-neutral, international law. The diffidence of general international law as regards the ‘speciality’ of human rights treaties is well reflected in the terms of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Consent and reciprocity are not, in that sense, mutually reinforcing, and indeed may supplant one another for the purposes of determining the presence of obligation in particular circumstances. The initial assumption is that reciprocity is a central leitmotif of inter-state dispute resolution and must necessarily play a role in quasi-judicial mechanisms as are found in human rights treaties.
