Davis, Madeleine; Chung, Philip; Greenlead, Graham; Kwok, Joseph --- "The Australian Treaties Library 1901-2003: The "Fifth Pillar" of Treaties Reform" [2004] UTSLawRw 10; (2004) 6 University of Technology Sydney Law Review 143
THE AUSTRALIAN TREATIES LIBRARY 1901-2003: THE "FIFTH PILLAR" OF TREATIES REFORM
Madeleine Davis, Philip Chung, Graham Greenleaf and Joseph Kwok*
A
ustLII publishes treaty information in a freely accessible form through the Australian Treaties Library (ATL) on the AustLII website. It is a
fully searchable, hypertext-linked resource that includes:
• Australian Treaty Series—full treaty texts, both bilateral and multilateral
(1901–)
• Australian Treaties Not yet In Force (1983–)
• Select Documents on International Affairs (1966–1999)
• National Interest Analyses for treaties tabled in Parliament (1996–)
• List of Multilateral Treaty Action under Negotiation or Consideration (provided to Parliament)
• Status Lists for Multilateral Treaties for which Australia is a Depositary
Monthly updates of treaty actions, as well as selected topical new treaties, are provided on the front page “News & Announcements” section of the Library.
Related explanatory material about treaty making includes:
• Australia and International Treaty Making—A Plain English Guide
• Australia and International Treaty Making: Information Kit, Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade (as at July 2000)
•Trick or Treaty? Commonwealth Power to Make and Implement Treaties, report by Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, November
1995
• United Nations General Assembly Resolution—Electronic Treaties
Database, adopted by consensus on 16 December 1996
• Links to
– Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)
– Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT)
– Glossary of Terms (UN Treaty Collection site)
– Treaty Reference Guide (UN Treaty Collection site)
The Library is updated monthly with material forwarded by DFAT to
AustLII to upload on the site.
In addition, the Library contains links to both Hong Kong and Pacific Islands treaties databases and the WorldLII Catalog and web spider search facility where hundreds of international websites listed at its Treaties and International Agreements directory can be searched.(1)
The establishment of this library was part of the Australian Government’s commitment to a treaty-making process based on consultation, scrutiny and transparency. On 2 May 1996, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Alexander Downer MP, and the Commonwealth Attorney- General, the Hon. Daryl Williams AM QC MP, announced reforms to facilitate the involvement of Parliament, the states and territories, industry, non-government organisations, and the wider community, in the making and implementation of Australian treaties. The 1996 reforms established five pillars to achieve these objectives:
1. Tabling treaties in Parliament for at least fifteen sitting days before binding action is taken;
2. Providing National Interest Analyses (NIAs) with all treaty action being tabled for parliamentary consideration;
3. Establishing a Joint Standing Committee on Treaties in the
Commonwealth Parliament;
4. Establishing a Commonwealth-State Treaties Council as an adjunct to the Council of Australian Governments; and
5. Making treaties more generally accessible, through construction of an
Internet database.
The last or fifth pillar was the establishment and development of the
Australian Treaties Library on AustLII.
With the cooperation of DFAT, treaties from previous years were compiled as AustLII began maintaining the more recent treaties in the database. Treaty documents were initially organised according to year. Users were provided with the facility to browse through the documents according to their date or their Australian Treaty Series number. Full text searching of the Treaties Library has also always been provided. AustLII has now consolidated the entire collection of Australian treaties since Federation in 1901 and is now only updating with new material to maintain the Library.
On-line Treaty Websites
There are many different types of online, mostly free access treaty sites found on the web. Some major sites are listed below :
• Multi-national treaty collection sites
– United Nations Treaty Collection http://untreaty.un.org
– Council of Europe (European Treaty Series) http://
conventions.coe.int
– Fletcher Multilaterals Project (Tufts University)http://
fletcher.tufts.edu/multilaterals.html
• Treaties by subject sites
– University of Minnesota Human Rights Library http://
www1.umn.edu/humanrts
– ENTRI (Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators) on
SEDAC
(Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center,http://sedac.ciesin. columbia.edu/entre/index.jsp
• Treaties by agency sites
– WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation)
http//:www.wipo.org
– UNESCO http://portal.unesco.org
– WTO (World Trade Organisation ) http://www.wto.org
– ILO (the ILOLEX collection) http://www.ilo.org/public
– IMO (International Maritime Organisation ) http://www.imo.org/
home.asp
• Treaty resource sites
– ASIL (American Society of International Law) http://www.asil.org
– LLRX (Law Library Research Xchange) http://www.llrx.com
– Many other catalogues/portals emanating from university research collections
• Treaty sites by geographic or political region
– Inter-American Treaties—OAS (Organisation of American States)
http://www.oas.org/main/english
• Specific treaty sites
– Law of the Sea http://www.itlos.org
– Convention on Biological Diversity http://www.biodiv.org
– Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Site http://www.clw.org/pub/clw/
coalition/ctbindex.htm>
– NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) http://www.nafta- sec-alena.org/DefaultSite/home/index_e.aspx
– Hague Conference http://hcch.e-vision.nl/index-en.php
• Treaties by country
– Australian Treaties Library http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat
– Norwegian Treaties and International Agreements (Lovdata)
http://www.lovdata.no/info/lawdata.html
The Australian Treaties Library is one of the most comprehensive and unique websites on the Web in terms of the free provision of this information. Although the United Nations treaty site is vast, it is not free and the treaty material can only be accessed by subscription. To date, the ATL comprises the full text of approximately 2,500 treaties to which Australia is a party (in one form or another), 450 select documents and
270 national interest analyses.
200x
198x
196x
194x
192x
190x
0 100 200 300 400 500
Number of treaties for each decade from 1901-2003
AustLII has always tried to provide complementary information retrieval or navigation systems on its site, including hierarchical, organised links, alphabetical or chronological indexes and a search engine to assist users to find and focus on relevant material. Adding a subject index to the actual full text database treaty information was the final step in the integration of all the research and navigation tools for the Australian Treaties Library by providing the ability to browse the information (via a hierarchical subject index) combined with AustLII’s own full text search engine. Users can now browse the treaties by subject, by country, by year and by short title or acronym.
A Subject Index
DEVELOPING THE FRAMEWORK
From the beginning of the project there were two major constraints:
• technical: determined by AustLII’s current standards; and
• the development of the index terms: a process of consultation with the
Treaties Secretariat at DFAT.
Organising and structuring the information to be consistent with the design of the rest of the AustLII website and the WorldLII catalogue. On AustLII, pages are deliberately minimalist, designed to be legible, short, to download quickly and be viewed on a variety of user platforms. The necessity for scrolling down pages has also been kept to a minimum. Generally the number of headings is small and the current WorldLII catalogue indexes offer two columns of category information wherever possible to alleviate the need for scrolling down. Navigation support is continuous. Currently on AustLII and WorldLII there is a clear navigation path and indication of what part of the site any one page belongs to, so users can track where they have been in the hierarchy.
General indexing standards emphasise consistency, clarity, and
logical organisation of the information. The challenge in particular for the Australian Treaties Library was to select the right set of subjects or categories and sub-categories to include on the screen. Adapting indexing techniques to the AustLII style has entailed adjusting and modifying normal indexing design. In the Australian Treaties Library subject index, each menu screen presents the user with a list of choices that lead to specified topics. However, only one level of indexing will appear on each screen as compared with the flatter structures of back-of-book indexes where up to three or four levels of information are laid out. On line, users may need to go through several layers to reach the contents or actual documents and treaty texts. This decision on layers is traded off against the users’ ability to target exactly the information they want: frustration with “drilling down” through a number of levels before getting to information is offset, hopefully, by the specificity of the information that can finally be retrieved.
However, on-line indexes have some advantages—the flexibility of the on-line format allows category entries to be expanded so that subject areas can be kept up to date and relevant, new categories can be added and the directories or contents pages have no limit to the number of entries.
The Treaties Library subject index is limited to two levels, heading and sub-heading (category/sub-category) so that the list of documents under each subject (seen as a list of treaty titles) would be seen at the second click, and the third click would take you through to the full text of the document selected.
The first level headings of the Subject Framework are shown below:
Treaties classified under the Intellectual and Industrial Property category
To complement the framework, AustLII’s search engine can be used to find all category and sub-category pages as well as for full text searching— to find terms in the text or titles of treaties. For example, if the term
“death” is entered in the search engine, treaties about the death penalty
(indexed under the Human Rights category) and statistics on causes of death (indexed under the Health category) will be returned as well as the category page headed “Death” (a sub-category of Health).
Most treaties are cross-referenced under two or more subjects or sub- categories; e.g. the various international and inter-government organisations are indexed by subject as well as under the International Organisations and Agencies category.
See references are not used. Instead double/triple posting of information
is used as all the indexing information can be updated by a complete dump each time new material is added. See also references to related areas of information are indicated on screen.
DEVELOPING THE INDEX TERMS
Development of index terms and the actual classification of treaties into subject areas proved more difficult.
A number of classifications systems (e.g. the United Nations UNBIS Thesaurus) were reviewed as well as other on-line treaty sites in the development of the subject framework. In fact, across the web or in print, there is no standard set of subjects nor a thesaurus nor even any consistency in classifying treaties except in very broad terms.
It was not possible to develop the subject categories using the “bottom up” method normally used by indexers—i.e. working from the actual treaty texts to develop the index. This was a major obstacle because while the full texts were available on line, the actual print versions resided in various files at DFAT in Canberra or in boxes in the compactus in the Treaties Secretariat at DFAT. Physically reading the documents would have involved accessing approximately 2,500 documents in another organisation and an interstate location.
DFAT originally used both a separate print index and a keyword print index of several hundred terms to classify its treaty documents, which in the end proved outdated and very difficult to integrate. These are still online in the original print format but are not really useful in that format for an online database. These original indexes were designed for the Department’s internal use and for the convenience of finding information in the hard copy of the treaty materials.
DFAT also had another index—the system of cataloguing the treaty boxes in which the actual original treaties were kept in the compactus. This was another list of eighty eight terms. Some of these terms and whatever terms proved consistent across the various other treaty websites on the Web were put forward for discussion with members of the Treaty Secretariat, and, after much consultation, a subject framework of twenty
one main headings with about 190 sub-headings was agreed.
CLASSIFYING THE TREATY DOCUMENTS
Once a reasonably complete and agreed framework of categories and sub- categories (about 210 categories) was available, each category was assigned
a number which in turn could be assigned to each treaty in the database. One or more category numbers could also be assigned to individual treaties
(i.e. if one treaty was to appear under more than one subject then both subject numbers were added to the treaty document. For example the treaty establishing the WTO is indexed under International Organisations
& Agencies as well as the Trade).
The subject matter for most treaties could be obtained from the information in the treaty title, otherwise the actual text was searched on line to determine the content. Many Boolean searches across the texts of the treaties in the database were also undertaken to check that indexing the content of the titles really did capture all the treaties for any subject. AustLII then implemented this index framework as an automated search across the database. The resulting lists of treaties under each subject are not fixed but are the result of a new search each time the user clicks on a heading. This allows new indexed treaties to appear under each heading when new treaties are uploaded into the database.
SPECIFIC PROBLEMS WITH CLASSIFYING TREATIES
• Different terms are used for like subjects:
– friendship and amity treaties are the early twentieth century, counterparts of the trade and economic cooperation treaties of the late twentieth Century and today;
– formal terms such as mutual assistance (in criminal matters) are used in most cases to mean extradition.
• Terms which are new to the language of treaties such as terrorism, hostages and money laundering need to be added as subjects to the framework as international criminal law expands.
• Changes in country names and entities needed to be taken into account. The Treaties Library has also to indicate treaties concluded with former states, hence a “Historical Country Names” list was developed. The names Rhodesia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia etc. no longer identify current sovereign states and names of newly-formed states had to be added.
• The arcane language of treaty texts makes it difficult sometimes to determine what the treaty is about. The language of 1901 is much more formal and euphemistic than the treaty texts of today.
• Difficulties with nomenclature/similar names for treaty subjects, such as the difference between arms control and disarmament, the different areas of compensation—war reparation and workers compensation
• Treaties, which, over time, have become subjects in themselves; e.g. Law of the Sea, Unidroit, GATT, MARPOL.
Treaties that establish organisations to which Australia belongs are not really a treaty subject but there are so many that it was useful to establish
a category in the index to cover them.
BENEFITS OF DEVELOPING THIS INDEX
A subject framework allows the user to browse through the treaty material giving a different and useful perspective across international relations and revealing what diplomacy has concentrated on through different decades.
• It allows users to see, for example, the number of different international organisations to which Australia belongs.
• It assists in researching the developing emphasis on areas of terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, mutua l assistance in criminal matters: the “new” areas of international concern.
• Users can see the numbers of treaties in each category and analyse trends through the decades. For example they can trace the development of the major human rights treaties last century; and the anti-terrorism, money laundering, anti-corruption treaties of today contrasting the emphasis on social concerns of earlier years with the defence and security concerns of today.
• Listing of the treaties in chronological order, once found under a specific subject allows users to see the differences in wording and approaches over the years and the changing tone and wording of the texts.
• Listing in chronological order by subject also allows users to see the amendments to treaties and agreements, the amendments to amendments, and the protocols in addition to the original documents. In this way the history of a particular treaty can be tracked.
• Previously it was not easy to look up all the Geneva Conventions about treatment of prisoners of war and civilians during war, let alone to find out which ones Australia has signed—which users can now do browsing the subject index.
• The treaty subject terms also now allow for a stored search using
Google.
Developing a subject framework as a browsing feature to facilitate the accessibility of the Australian Treaties Library will now allow users to research treaty materials indexed according to the content of the treaties. Bringing together information using an intellectual subject index gives results which are difficult to obtain in other ways, even using sophisticated Boolean syntax with a search engine.
Short Titles, Acronyms, Popular Names
In addition to the subject framework, the treaties are also indexed by country and by short title or acronym e.g. GATT, INTELSAT, MARPOL, Rome Convention, SOLAS, Berne Convention, Timor Gap Treaty etc. The short title of a treaty is often used as a matter of convenience and custom
and has been added to assist in browsing the database when the full title of the treaty is unknown or has been forgotten with time.
For example, the International Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Relating to International Carriage by Air is really the Warsaw Convention. Likewise the Treaty between Australia and the Republic of Indonesia on the Zone
of Cooperation in an Area between the Indonesian Province of East Timor and
Northern Australia is better known as the Timor Gap Treaty.
Medium Neutral Citation Standard—One Identification
Structure for Treaties in Print and On Line
One of the enhancements that has been agreed with DFAT, and used internally by AustII for some time, is medium neutral citation of the treaty documents and related materials. The Department has always assigned a number for every treaty—the Australia Treaties Series (ATS) number—but
it is not a formal citation system and there are a number of conflicting ways of referring to such numbers in publications.
AustLII and DFAT have now agreed to adopt a medium neutral citation standard for documents in the Australian Treaties Library which would give
a unique identifying reference to each document and allow each to be cited irrespective of whether it is published in print form or the electronic form available on the AustLII/DFAT site. At this stage this will apply to those documents which AustLII currently receives—Treaties, National Interest Analyses (NIA) and Australian Treaties not yet In Force (ATNIF).
Medium neutral citation standards have been implemented by AustLII as a general policy since the adoption of this standard for citation of cases by the High Court of Australia and other Australian courts from 1999. AustLII has also extended this mechanism to the secondary materials that
it holds on line such as law journals.
Other international treaties series’ citation methods currently used are primarily for reference in print publications, namely U.N.T.S. (United Nations Treaty Series), L.N.T.S. (League of Nations Treaty Series), UKTS
(United Kingdom Treaty Series), ETS (European Treaty Series) and the various US treaty documents: U.S.T. (United States Treaties and Other International Agreements), T.I.A.S. (Treaties and Other International Acts Series), T.S. (Treaty Series superseded by T.I.A.S.), and E.A.S. (Executive Agreement Series).
Adoption of the medium neutral citation standard will ensure consistency of referencing throughout the Australian Treaties Library and will enable implementation of AustLII’s automatic mark up and search processes. The various treaty databases are “marked up” by AustLII with automatically inserted hypertext links from the citations in the text: so other treaties, NIAs and ATNIFs referred to in a document will automatically be linked to allow the user to view the full text of the referenced document on another part of the database. In the same way, a search using a particular
treaty or other citation will show all references to the document in the Australian Treaties Library, which will allow for future features such as AustLII’s Noteup (similar to that on AustLII’s legislation databases) to be implemented.
Adoption of the standard will also benefit the user wanting to find and/or cite references from either the electronic or the print version of the same document from the Australian Treaties Series (e.g. [2002] ATS 2), ATNIF ([2002] ATNIF 2) and NIA ([2002] ATNIA 2.
When preparing new documents for the Australian Treaties Library, medium neutral citation becomes part of the title of the treaty or treaty document and is also used in all references to individual treaties, NIAs and ATNIFs within the footnotes for each document.
For example:
Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the Arab
Republic of Egypt Regarding Cooperation on Protecting the Welfare of Children
(Cairo, 22 October 2000) Australian Treaty Series [2002] ATS 3
In this Agreement three other Conventions are referred to in the text. Now such references also include a note to the text with the full treaty/ convention name and the ATS medium neutral citation e.g.:
– The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (New York, 20
November 1989) [1991] ATS 4
– Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (18 April, 1961) [1968] ATS 3
– Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (24 April, 1963) [1973] ATS 7
With this additional citation information AustLII’s automatic hyperlinks and Noteup (a future enhancement) can be implemented successfully throughout the library.
More Added Value for the User
Future developments for the Australian Treaties Library include
• Noteup—an automated, predetermined search across the AustLII/ WorldLII databases to find all documents related to each treaty.
• Notes for each treaty—links to NIAs, Risk Impact Statements, ATNIFs and legislation/regulations passed or issued pursuant to treaty action; links to relevant organisations, e.g. JSCOT reports. One of the issues being dealt with currently is that specific treaty reference materials— notes on every Australian treaty such as the date and place of execution, enforcement date, reference to NIAs etc—have been designed and organised to suit a paper-based format and it is not easy to integrate this with the on-line format. DFAT is currently re-entering information from its print-based system to a new database format which will make
it easier for AustLII to extract the additional treaty data and integrate different documents in the Australian Treaties Library.
• More cross-referencing will become available, e.g. the ability to browse treaties by country, then by subject within each country; treaties by
year and by country; treaties by year and by subject, bilateral treaties with other countries, countries by year and so on.
The navigation circle on the Australian Treaties Library is now almost complete. The best sites on the Web are those which offer integration of navigation methods—i.e. a site map or contents list, formal navigation paths, a search engine and an intellectual index—to ensure that the user has the best possible access to the information. This is what AustLII has developed and is expanding, using the combined capacities of its technical and indexing resources.
* Madeleine Davis is Project Officer, AustLII and indexer for WorldLII; Philip Chung is Executive
Director, AustLII and Lecturer in Law, University of Technology, Sydney; Graham Greenleaf is
Co-Director, AustLII and Professor of Law, University of New South Wales; Joseph Kwok is Project
Officer, AustLII.
[1] <http://www.worldlii.org/catalog/2266.html> .
[2] The joint statement by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Attorney-General on reform of treaty-making (2 May 1996) is available at <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/infokit/infokit. html#sect4> .
[3] More information about the treaty-making process can be found in Department of Foreign Affairs
& Trade, Australia and International Treaty Making Information Kit, (2000) <http://www.austlii.edu. au/au/other/dfat/infokit.html> .
[4] M Davis, P Chung, G Greenleaf, T Hasuike, “Managing Secondary Legal Resources on AustLII” in proceedings of the Law via the Internet Conference 2001.
[5] AustLII’s general approach to user interface and accessibility issues is discussed in P Chung, D Austin and M Mowbray, “A Defence of Plain HTML for Law: AustLII’s Approach to Standards” (2000) 1 The Journal of Information of Information, Law and Technology <http:..www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/ elj/jilt/2000_1?chung?> as at August 2004.
[6] Medium and vendor neutral citation (or court-designated citation in the context of case law) is a recommendation of the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration and is discussed in The Hon Justice LT Olsson, Guide to Uniform Production of Judgements (2nd ed, 1999). In particular, see <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/CompLRes/1999/1/6. html> .