Reservation to International Human Rights Treaties

Reservation to an international treaty means a unilateral statement made by a State, when signing, ratifying, accepting, approving or acceding to a treaty, whereby it purports to exclude or to modify the legal effect of certain provisions of the treaty in their application to that State. Human rights treaties do not regulate the relations between states, but guarantee the rights of individuals with regard to the state. A treaty of such a nature should be set out without the interventions or interruptions of the States. Use of reservation in human rights treaties are seen by human rights activists, as a disturbance to the actual purpose and motive of the treaties as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties continues to govern the matters of reservations to human rights treaties and the fundamental rule remains that a reservation cannot be incompatible with the object and purpose of a treaty. Reservation also makes human rights treaties interdependent in nature as the states interpret the treaties with their own laws and create certain restrictions and modifications in the treaties which spoil the actual essence and purpose of the treaty and it remains without serving any much good to the people. This research paper will basically answer the question as to what extent states can validly make reservations to human rights treaties. This paper tries to address the following questions such as what is the reason for providing reservations in international conventions, how do these reservations make the treaties weak in the light of human rights treaties, how to protect the treaties from getting influenced by different states.