Exercising Reservations in Convention on International Settlement Agreements

As one of the oldest and most important dispute resolution methods, mediation or agreement has always been less successful than arbitration due to the lack of executive support for settlement agreements. By approving the Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, the United Nations sought to take an important step in promoting this dispute resolution method by eliminating the above-mentioned shortcoming. The convention recognizes two reservations for members; if they are applied, the convention cannot be used for implementing governmental settlement agreements, and implementing the convention depends on the agreement of the parties. Iran, as a signatory to the settlement agreement convention, in addition to exercising the two reservations in the settlement agreement, has also sought to enforce other reservations at the time of signing. A basic, descriptive, and analytical research method was used to examine the above issues, focusing on the legal analysis of the reservations in the Convention on International Settlement Agreements and Iran’s approach to the application of the reservations in the Convention on International Settlement Agreements. Finally, the present study concludes that from a legal point of view, the reservations in the convention do not seem very reasonable and will certainly reduce the effectiveness of the settlement agreement to some extent. However, given the greater need for ratification of the convention and the consensus of countries, it seems expedient to mention these reservations. In this paper, the Iranian legislature is advised not to exercise any of the reservations of the settlement agreement convention at the time of accession and completely remove the optional reservations mentioned in the Iran declaration. According to the convention’s provisions, it is possible to exercise the reservations at any time, and Iran can use reservations later after examining the application reservations of the convention.