Development of Private International Law
Private
international law has long been the instrument that has
regulated the relations among our societies, facilitating
the movement of persons, exchanges of goods and services,
fostering integration, and combating illegal cross-border
activities. The process of codification of private
international law in the inter-American context has been one
of the ongoing legal activities of the American states since
the closing decades of the 1800s. This work has taken
different institutional forms and is currently being carried
out as a legal process through the Specialized Conferences
on Private International Law (CIDIPs).
When the first
CIDIP was held in 1975, the OAS set out upon a familiar road
upon which it first embarked toward the end of the 19th
century. The adoption of the first Treaties of Montevideo in
1889 and of the Bustamante Code in 1928 laid the groundwork
for the establishment of private international law in this
Hemisphere.
Since the start
of work on the codification of private international law,
two different approaches have been taken. The first involved
a global approach that envisaged a single body of rules
including all the rules of this discipline, while the other
approach envisaged a process that was more gradual and
progressive, involving the drafting of specific
international instruments in discrete areas of the law.
The approach of
drafting a single code was the prevailing one during the
Congress of Lima in 1877 and culminated in the adoption of a
single code of international law, the Bustamante Code, at
the Sixth International Conference of American States in
Havana in 1928.
In the period
immediately following the establishment of the Organization
of American States, the Inter-American Juridical Committee
made new efforts to codify all the different areas of
private international law. To that end, the Committee
proposed to review the Bustamante Code to determine whether
it was possible to merge its provisions with those of the
Montevideo treaties of 1889 and 1939-1940, in light of the
U.S. Restatement of the Law of the Conflict of Laws for
private international law.
As a result of
this effort, the Inter-American Juridical Committee prepared
a draft code, which was not supported by the Member States
of the Organization. This led to the abandonment of the
global approach to codification of this legal discipline and
the beginning of the second stage, in which sectoral
codification of private international law predominated.
Thus, in 1971,
the mechanisms previously used in the treatment of private
international law in the American context were replaced by
the Specialized Conferences, or CIDIPs, with which we are
familiar today. The Charter of the OAS describes Specialized
Conferences as “intergovernmental meetings to deal with
special technical matters or to develop specific aspects of
inter-American cooperation”[1]/
[1]. Charter of
the Organization of American States, Article 122. |