Abstract :
Treaty interpretation means that a treaty is interpreted in the course of implementation and application after it has entered into force. The rules of treaty interpretation of 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaty (VCLT) were expressly applied to dispute settlement by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 1994 case of Territorial Dispute (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya v. Chad), and then by the Appellate Body of Dispute Settlement of the World Settlement of the World (WTO) in the 1996 case of United States - Standards for Reformulated and Conventional Gasoline as “the customary rules of interpretation of public international law”. This article is mainly based on leading cases of the ICJ and the WTO in last decade to offer a systematic analysis of treaty interpretation in the practices of contemporary international laws and to discuss some theoretical issues regarding the rules, methods and approaches of treaty interpretation with some viewpoints of the International Law Commission’s Commentaries on the VCLT and of well-known international lawyers.
