O Comitê Jurídico Interamericano da OEA e a codificação do direito internacional regional

Abstract

This contribution shall assess whether and to what extent the work of the Inter-American Juridical Committee may favour a certain regionalisation of international law. More precisely, the focus is on the question of whether and to what extent the work of the Committee may favour the emergence of regional, non written, customary rules. The work is divided in three parts. Firstly, I will briefly contextualize the idea of regionalism in Latin America and, particularly, the notion of codification in the Continent. Although there has been much scholarly work on the issue, revisiting this debate proves to be important since it is within it that the first committee was created with the task of codifying international law. In the second part, I shall examine the method of work of the Inter American Juridical Committee. In this respect, I will inquire if the Committee favours the promotion or contributes to the idea of rules of international law applicable only in the relationship between American States. The last problem I would like to address concerns the interactions between the work of codification of the Inter-American Juridical Committee and that of the International Law Commission. My purpose here is to assess the relationship between a regional perspective and a universal perspective in the process of codification, especially when the same topic is covered by the two bodies and potential conflicts of laws might arise. For this purpose, the methodology employed was the analysis of the primary sources of the Committee as well as the bibliographical analysis on the work of codification of international law. The main argument I sustain is that directly or indirectly the IAJC favours a certain regionalisation of international law by focusing, particularly in its most recent work, on the practice and opinio juris of American States. This occurs despite the coordination between the IAJC and the ILC.