INTRODUCTION

As discussed in Chapter 6, the term ‘mixed convention’ had a different meaning for the US delegation than for the EC and its Member States. The next question that has to be explored in order to understand why the Judgments Project failed, therefore, is whether the US delegation potentially contributed to this misunderstanding by not making their understanding of a mixed convention (the true mixed convention as originally proposed by the US delegation and the Working Group in 1992) clear enough during the pre-negotiation phase of the Special Commission meetings. In fact, the concerns raised by the US delegation in the letter to Hans van Loon, the then Secretary General of the Hague Conference, that was sent after the Special Commission meeting in October 1999 seemed to have taken some of the other delegations, especially from Member States of the EC, by surprise. One of the experts of the United Kingdom delegation to the Special Commission meetings from 1996 onwards, Paul R Beaumont, remarked that Jeffrey D Kovar's letter had interrupted ‘the relatively smooth path to a Diplomatic Conference’.

Equally, the Portuguese ambassador and permanent representative to the EU, Vasco Valente, declared in a fax to the Secretary General of the Hague Conference that Portugal had taken note of the Kovar letter ‘with apprehension’. If the US had voiced their concerns about the structure of the convention only after the elaboration of the final version of the preliminary draft convention text in October 1999, then they would also have contributed to the failure of the Judgments Project to a certain extent.