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This chapter discusses the notion of treaty conflict and the various suggestions that have been made to solve them. It goes into the drafting of the Vienna Convention and explains treaty conflict along more or less systemic lines, resulting from the Vienna Convention's drafters' choice to concentrate on form rather than substance in conjunction with the circumstance that in a horizontal legal order, a treaty is res inter alios acta. It is argued that the unsolvable nature of some treaty conflicts need not necessarily be considered overly problematic, but that much will depend on the attitude of those charged with the task of applying treaties and settling disputes: a virtuous approach is called for.

This chapter provides an overview of the jurisdictional relationship between international courts under general public international law. It is based on a distinction between conflicts of jurisdiction in the narrow sense and parallel proceedings and explores them in turn. Conflicts of jurisdiction are classified as conflicts between treaty norms, which necessitates a definition of treaty conflicts and a discussion of ways to resolve them (lex posterior, lex specialis, conflict clauses, abuse of rights, etc.) with the specificities of jurisdictional conflicts in mind. Concluding that not all conflicts of jurisdiction can be resolved on the basis of positive international law, the remainder of the chapter is dedicated to parallel proceedings, in particular res judicata and lis alibi pendens.

International law regime of conflicts between treaties is obtained by combining the principles of the succession of treaties over time (the later treaty abrogates the earlier one) and the principle concerning the effects of treaties on third-party States (Pacta tertiis neque nocent neque prosunt). In fact, conflicts between treaties are not frequent as states prefer to negotiate in order to avoid them. Most of the time, negotiations lead to the inclusion in a treaty of declarations of ‘compatibility’ or ‘subordination’ with another or a series of other treaties. Some of them are analysed in this chapter.

This part introduces and illustrates the idea of a legal dilemma by means of a hypothetical Cartesian coordinate system. The introduction alsosets out the objectives of the book. It does so with reference to three research questions concerning, first, the definition of a legal dilemma, second, the possibility of the existence of a legal dilemma, and, finally, the way in which the international legal order should address legal dilemmas. Subsequently, the introduction outlines five examples to which the book keeps referring. The examples concern the regulation of nuclear weapons, submarine warfare, military alliances, conflicting infrastructure treaties, and the rescue of persons in distress at sea.