Introduction, Application and Place of Treaties and International Agreements in the Congolese Legal System

For Val?rie KABEYA VULUKA, examining the question of the Congolese judge and the applicability of international treaties and agreements shows that in the relationship between international law and internal law, the Congolese justice is at the heart of the turmoil following conflicts between conventional standards and internal standards, the tendency of the judge being to favor the application of the second to the detriment of the former. The provisions of a treaty may conflict not only with other conventional international standards or not, but also with internal standards. Such an incident is related to the general problem of the relationship between international law and domestic law. To solve it, the doctrine is divided between dualism and monism. Proponents of the former believe that such conflicts can not occur while, although rare monists still advocate the primacy of domestic law, most of them are in favor of the superiority of international law. They can find an argument today in Article 27 of the Vienna Convention which provides that a party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for the non-performance of a treaty rule which appears as the complement of the principle pactasuntservanda expressed in the aforementioned article. () The law's organ of the people, the international judge affirms in all circumstances the superiority of this one it does not draw all the consequences of principle here as elsewhere, international litigation is generally a litigation of liability and not of cancellation. G. Scelle's statement that the domestic standard contrary to an international standard is repealed is rightly a figure of rhetoric. Therefore, says the author, standard of domestic law, the constitutional rule can not defeat the application of a treaty. The International Criminal Court (PCIJ) strongly recalled this in its advisory opinion of 4 February 1932 concerning the treatment of Polish nationals.