II Treaty Interpretation and Other Treaty Points, Division A: Treaty Interpretation, Fitzmaurice’s Principles

As stated by Fitzmaurice, this is the principle that ‘Treaties are to be interpreted as they stand, and on the basis of their actual texts’, that is to say ‘prima facie, without reference to extraneous factors’.130 In the Territorial Dispute between Libya and Chad, the Court stated that ‘interpretation must be based above all on the text of a treaty’.131 It will be convenient to treat this principle together with the following one (as was done in the earlier article). Fitzmaurice’s statement of this principle is more lengthy: essentially it corresponds to the...