This article analyses the practice of the Polish administrative courts with respect to application of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, based on a case study of the judgment of the Voivodship Administrative Court in Warsaw of 6 May 2014 (case no. II SA/Wa 117/14), which concerned the recognition of distance learning degrees awarded by Ukrainian universities pursuant to the 1972 Prague Convention. It is argued herein that the reasoning of the court suffers from four major drawbacks: 1) it is at variance with the text, object and purpose of the Prague Convention; 2) it does not take into account the practice in the application of that treaty; 3) it misinterprets the silence of the preparatory work to the Prague Convention on certain issues; and 4) it is inconsistent with international judicial decisions as regards the interpretation of the “special meaning” of one of the terms used in the Convention.
The article aims to study the cases of collective non-recognition of certain States by the League of Nations and the United Nations, and to determine the legal basis of the measures adopted. The author divides the legal grounds for non-recognition into substantive and formal ones. In the course of the case study, four substantive grounds are identified, more than one of which was violated during the process of creation of each non-recognized State: the ban on the use of force, the territorial integrity of States, the right to self-determination and the prohibition of apartheid and racial discrimination. The examination of formal grounds reveals that the virtually universal compliance with UN calls might have been driven not only by binding resolutions but also by the treaties, customary norms and peremptory norms, binding different UN members and non-members to a varying extent. Still, since the non-recognized States were neither members of the UN nor were bound by respective treaties, the illegality of their creation may only be explained with reference to violation of the peremptory norms and, in some cases, of the customary norms of international law.
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