K úsilí o rozvoj prostředků pokojného řešení mezinárodních sporů, zvláště v Evropě

In the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which was signed on 21 November 1990, the heads of state or government of the states participating in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) declared that an essential complement to the duty of states to refrain from the threat or use of force was the peaceful settlement of disputes Therefore, they promised to seek not only effective ways of preventing, through political means, conflicts which might yet emerge, but also define, in conformity with international law, appropriate mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of any disputes which might arise. In this contribution, which was inspired by the above-mentioned declaration, the author makes an assessment of the long development of the principle that states shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means, which became one of the fundamental principles of the contemporary international law. In the first part, he deals with the evolution of the methods of peaceful settlement from the beginning of this century until World War II. Attention is drawn to the inputs of the 1899/1907 Hague Peace Conferences, the system established by the 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations and the endeavours to supplement this system by additional instruments. The second part is devoted to the system of pacific settlement of disputes under the United Nations Charter, including the important role of the International Court of Justice. Furthermore, attention is drawn to a number of relevant documents which were adopted during the last decades, such as the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law, the 1982 Manila Declaration and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. In the author’s view, many of these principles, guidelines and mechanisms might serve as an example how to proceed with the problems of establishing an effective system of peaceful settlement of disputes among the states of Europe. In the third part, the role of the peaceful settlement of international disputes under the Helsinki process and the up-to-date results of negotiations for this purpose are analyzed. In particular, attention is concentrated on the Principles for Dispute Settlement and Provisions for a CSCE Procedure for Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, which were worked out by the meeting of experts at Valletta in 1991 and endorsed the same year by the CSCE Council at its first session in Berlin. In the author’s view, these results, particularly the proposed Dispute Settlement Mechanism, bear visible traces of a compromise between efforts to strengthen the mandatory third-party involvement and introduce the compulsory use of judicial means, and attempts at establishing only a certain political mechanism which would act on the existing legal basis. Unlike the earlier instruments, the up-to-date results of the Helsinki process are based on political decisions and procedures. However, the participants of the Helsinki process seem to have the necessary political will to bring these conclusions to life and apply them consequently to the emerging disputes and situations. At the same time, the Helsinki process is not an isolated trend, for it develops together with other processes and mechanisms which exist both in the European and the world scale. In this respect, e.g., the admission of new members to the Council of Europe opens the door to extending the number of states-parties to the 1957 European Convention for the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes and the 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms with Protocols. In this way, a legal basis for an all European system of the peaceful settlement of disputes might be established, which together with the Helsinki Mechanism could effectively play the role provided in Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter for regional arrangements, in achieving the pacific settlement of local disputes in the European scale.