Page 155 - The Arabian Gulf States_Neat

THE PRESENT LEGAL POSITION 93
dom as applicable to her treaty of 1952 with the Sultan of Lahej. In
this ease, the United Kingdom was reported as saying that
the provisions of the treaty, made in 1952, arc not terminable except by
negotiation between the Sultan and the Governor of Aden, representing the
United Kingdom.1
The acceptance by the United Kingdom of the principle of negotia­
tion as a basis for terminating her treaties with a State under her
protection is significant in that it seems to place indirect emphasis on
the international character of the relations between her and such a
protected State. The principle of terminating treaties which are of
‘perpetual duration’ by negotiation is the basis of British normal
practice in the field of international law.2
Accordingly, if it is correct to assume that the Shaikhdoms’
treaties can be terminated by direct negotiations between the Rulers
and the British Government, the question arises whether a failure on
the part of the British Government to accede to the Rulers’ request
for the total abolition of these treaties would give the Rulers the right
to abrogate them unilaterally? This is a difficult question to answer.
The customary rules of international law on the manner in which
treaties between independent States may be terminated by negotia­
tions or, if negotiations fail, by unilateral denunciation are explained
by text writers as follows:
Lord McNair states:
It is probably true to say that in the case of political treaties, bipartite or
multipartite, there is a greater disposition to go into conference at the
request of a party with a view to revision of the mutual obligation so as to
bring them more into accord with modern conditions, and that a refusal to
confer upon these lines would in some degree mitigate the censure which
would still be due to a state which, with or without some moral justification
to support it, announced its intention to regard a burdensome obligation
as no longer binding upon it.3

On the same point, Oppenheim says that:
when a State is of the view that the obligations of a treaty have, through a
vital change of circumstances become unbearable, the proper course for it is
first to approach the other party (or parties), and request it to agree to the
abrogation of the treaty. If the party or parties thus approached refuse to
accede to the request—which ought to be coupled with an offer to submit
xSce The Times, 17 April 1958. The principle that treaties of protection are
terminable by negotiation has been applied in the case of the Kuwaiti Agreement
of 1899 with Britain which was terminated in 1961 by the concurrence of both
parties. This is a lucid example of how treaties of protection in the Arabian Gulf
can be brought to an end by the agreement of both the British Government and
the Rulers of the Shaikhdoms concerned.
a McNair, Treaties, p. 351. 3 Ibid., pp. 369-70.