Augustauskaitė-Keršienė, Aistė

This dissertation examines reservations to international human rights treaties as one of the most contentious issues in international treaty law, exposing the tension between state sovereignty and universal human rights protection. It critically assesses the decentralized reservation regime under the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, demonstrating that the “object and purpose” test remains insufficiently defined and that the state objection mechanism operates ineffectively in the human rights context. Through analysis of reservations to key instruments, the study identifies systemic weaknesses: widespread religion and culture-based reservations, politically driven objection practices, and the non-binding character of treaty body determinations. Empirical review of state practice demonstrates that objections rarely produce meaningful change without sustained civil society pressure. The dissertation’s innovative contribution proposes the use of artificial intelligence to enhance monitoring and transparency, including automated tracking, natural language processing, and multilingual databases for identifying potentially incompatible reservations, whilst preserving the primacy of human legal judgement. Reform proposals include clarifying the “object and purpose” standard, strengthening institutional oversight, and integrating AI-supported monitoring with appropriate ethical safeguards.

The goal of this master thesis is to find the link between the harmful traditional practices against women that have been one of the biggest problems last decades in international community and reservations made to human rights treaties that relate gender issues. For this reason the author analyzes the practice under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Social and Economical Rights and Convention on the Rights of the Child. These treaties were chosen because they laid down the most significant principles in the protection of equality between women and men rights. Moreover, a number of reservations made to the fundamental provisions of these treaties relating gender issues is very high. It has to be noted that states making reservations, justify themselves that the provisions are incompatible with national laws and traditions. This issue makes the implementation of the treaties much more difficult than it might be seen. In order to find the solutions for the above mentioned issues, author analyzes whether the Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties regime works properly in the human rights treaties, what reservations might be invalid under the human rights treaties that are related to gender issues, what is the states practice according to the reservations and what could be the solution for the best protection from the invalid reservations that address gender equality as one of the fundamental right of human beings in the human rights law.