HGP Nightly News – International law professor Andreas Zimmermann has told the International Court of Justice that the 1966 Geneva Agreement was never intended to simply determine whether the 1899 Arbitral Award was valid or invalid, but to create a fresh process for resolving the wider boundary controversy between Guyana and Venezuela.
Appearing in defence of Venezuela in the ongoing border case, Zimmermann argued that Guyana’s interpretation of the Geneva Agreement is too narrow. He said the agreement did not frame the issue as a single legal question about the validity of the 1899 Award, but as a broader controversy requiring a practical and mutually acceptable settlement.
According to Zimmermann, if the parties had intended the Geneva Agreement to focus only on whether the 1899 Award was null and void, they would have used clearer legal language to say so.
He argued that the agreement instead referred to a “controversy” and to the search for “satisfactory solutions,” language which, in his view, points to a future-looking negotiation process rather than a court simply deciding whether the award stands.
Zimmermann said the use of the plural term “solutions” is significant. He submitted that this shows the parties were not seeking a binary result, with one side winning and the other losing on the validity of the 1899 Award. Rather, he said, they were trying to create room for compromise.
He also argued that the phrase “practical settlement” supports Venezuela’s position. Relying on international jurisprudence, Zimmermann compared the Geneva Agreement with a 1923 arrangement involving Poland and Danzig, where the parties expressly stated that a practical settlement would not alter the existing legal position.
Zimmermann said the Geneva Agreement contains no such saving clause. In his view, that omission was deliberate and meant that the parties intended to move beyond the legal effects of the 1899 process and seek a new settlement.
He described that as a “new start” in the legal relationship between the parties.
The professor further pointed to provisions of the Geneva Agreement allowing experts to assist the Mixed Commission. He said this would make little sense if the only task was to decide the validity of an arbitral award, which he described as a purely legal question.
Instead, he argued, the reference to experts suggested that technical matters such as geography, geology, mapping and boundary delimitation could form part of the process.
Zimmermann also relied on the agreement’s reference to “outstanding questions” in the plural. He said that wording confirms that the parties expected more than one issue to remain unresolved if the Mixed Commission failed to reach agreement.
He argued that if the only question had been the validity of the 1899 Award, there would have been just one outstanding issue.
Venezuela’s position, as advanced by Zimmermann, is that the Geneva Agreement replaced the focus on the 1899 Award with a broader search for a negotiated settlement of the territorial controversy.
Guyana, however, has maintained that the 1899 Arbitral Award is valid, binding and legally settled the boundary between the two countries.
