3 The Scope and Content of Obligations Regarding Transit of Energy

Subject(s):

ECT (Energy Charter Treaty) — Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

Chapter 3 analyses the scope and content of treaty obligations regarding transit, revealing a variety of primary rules. The exercise in this chapter assists in the determination of when and how a breach of transit obligations takes place, thus providing the framework for the discussion in all the following chapters. Treaty obligations regarding transit are classified as obligations of conduct or of result. Finally, security exceptions in the GATT, the ECT and other language in bespoke pipeline agreements and the Model Inter-Governmental Pipeline Agreement prepared by the Energy Charter Secretariat, is examined with a view to establishing whether they constitute special circumstances precluding wrongfulness displacing countermeasures under customary international law or whether they form part of primary obligations incumbent on treaty parties.