Greetings to dr jacobs.

I am engku iman nuraina and I will be

presenting on the prohibition of reservations. The permissibility
of reservations to an international treaty is a crucial issue
because, on one hand, there is a desire to maintain a treaty's
'integrity' so that parties are treated equally in terms of their
rights and obligations, and on the other hand, the goal is to
ensure that parties participate more fully even if they do not
agree with all of the treaty's provisions Interdependence, the
importance of the provision to which the reservation is made in
the general context of the treaty, and the impact that the
reservations has on the treaty should all be considered when
assessing the compatibility of a reservation with the purpose and
object of a treaty that contains many interdependent rights and
obligations. The problem of reservations that are incompatible
with the treaty's object and purpose is a contentious one,
particularly when it comes to human rights treaties. A
reservation to a provision that gives a right to which no
derogation is permitted is banned, according to the Guide to
Practice of the United Nations International Law Commission1,
unless these reservations are in line with the core rights and
obligations resulting from this treaty.
I would like to first start the discussion on CEDAW, which is
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women. The Convention is one of the
most important international human rights accords in terms of
bringing the female half of humankind to the forefront of human
rights concerns. The Convention allows for ratification with
1
'International Law Commission' (Legal.un.org, 2021) <https://legal.un.org/ilc/> accessed 4 October 2021.
reservations as long as the objections do not conflict with the
Convention's object and purpose. . A number of States make
reservations to specific articles on the grounds that their national
law, tradition, religion, or culture are incompatible with
Convention principles, and they claim to be justified in doing so.
Despite the fact that their national constitutions or statutes ban
discrimination, some states make a reservation to article 2 2. As a
result, the provisions of the State's constitution and its
reservation to the Convention are incompatible. Some
reservations are so broad that their impact cannot be limited to
individual Convention articles. An example in Iraq is where
Iraq's compliance with the (CEDAW) was discussed in a session
of the Committee of (CEDAW). Articles 2, 3, 10, 15, and 16 of
the convention are addressed. Firstly, is in regards to Yezidi
Women and Girls Subject to Abuses by ISIS which is written
under CEDAW Art 2,3 and 16. Secondly, is the detention of
non-Iraqi female relatives of ISIS members stated in CEDAW
Art 2, 15 and 16. Next is the violence against women including
domestic violence and honor killings under CEDAW Art 2,3 and

2
'Reservations To CEDAW' (Un.org, 2021) <https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/reservations.htm>
accessed 4 October 2021.
16, in which these discussions have received tremendous
backlash and many recommendations that have been given to
the Iraqi government.
My next discussion is on the Human Rights Treaties and
Impermissibility of Reservations. It has been highlighted that
there has been widespread concern for some time that
reservations to human rights treaties could jeopardise the
universality of human rights. Indeed, the Human Rights
Committee's description of the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights may lead one to believe that the Vienna
Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) is incapable of
resolving reservations issues in human rights treaties because
"many of its provisions are written to reflect the operation of a
multilateral treaty between States in issues of human rights,
Where States act in their own interests in relation to other States,
there are no third parties with their own rights or obligations,
and the treaty does not constitute an independent international
framework for its application and interpretation'. In the sphere of
international human rights law, the expanding number of treaties
and reservations to them, as well as monitoring bodies, has
brought the issue of unlawful reservations back into attention.
As said by Martin Scheinin, the Human Rights Committee's
General Comment No. 24 contains two aspects that are
incompatible with the VCLT. the following are ‘(a) A human
rights treaty body, created for the purpose of interpreting the
treaty and monitoring States' compliance with its provisions, has
the authority to decide whether reservations made under the
treaty in question are permissible; (b) The severability of an
inadmissible reservation is the normal (but not always
automatic) result, i.e., the State in question is regarded bound by
the treaty but without the benefit of the reservation.it can be
concluded that the governments or organisations party to a
treaty, entities created by the treaty to resolve disputes, or
monitoring bodies created for the treaty's implementation can all
review the permissibility of a reservation. That’s all from me,
thank you