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The question of whether the monitoring bodies have competence concerning reservations is at the centre of the discussion of reservations to human rights treaties that has occupied many international legal scholars over the last few decades. The Istanbul Convention’s treaty monitoring body, GREVIO, is the only human rights treaty monitoring body with a direct competence concerning reservations. However, as practice to date shows, it does not make much use of this power. This is a big disappointment considering all the efforts of other bodies in the past and the doctrinal positions of various scholars. The main aims of this article are threefold to: present GREVIO’s practice to date concerning reservations, provide a brief historical overview of how other human rights treaty bodies have approached their role concerning reservations, and finally, attempt to explain why GREVIO has abandoned a more proactive position on reservations.
Back in 1949, and thus only one year after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted, providing a strong signal for a new world order created after 1945 with the United Nations at their centre and combining as their goals both the maintenance of peace and security and the protection of human rights, but also recognising, realistically, that succeeding generations had so far not yet been saved from the scourge of war. Hence, the continued need for rules governing, and limiting, the means and methods of warfare once an armed conflict has erupted. At the same time, the international community has unfortunately not been able so far to fully safeguard individual human rights, its efforts to that effect and the continuous development of international human rights law over the years notwithstanding.