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Concept
Montevideo Convention
Summary
The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States is a treaty signed at Montevideo, Uruguay, on December 26, 1933, during the Seventh International Conference of American States. The Convention codifies the declarative theory of statehood as accepted as part of customary international law. At the conference, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared the Good Neighbor Policy, which opposed U.S. armed intervention in inter-American affairs. The convention was signed by 19 states. The acceptance of three of the signatories was subject to minor reservations. Those states were Brazil, Peru and the United States.
The convention became operative on December 26, 1934. It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on January 8, 1936.
The conference is notable in U.S. history, since one of the U.S. representatives was Dr. Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, the first U.S. female representative at an international conference.
Declarative theory of statehood
In most cases, the only avenue open to self-determination for colonial or national ethnic minority populations was to achieve international legal personality as a nation-state. The majority of delegations at the International Conference of American States represented independent states that had emerged from former colonies. In most cases, their own existence and independence had been disputed or opposed by one or more of the European colonial empires. They agreed among themselves to criteria that made it easier for other dependent states with limited sovereignty to gain international recognition.
The convention sets out the definition, rights and duties of statehood. Most well-known is Article 1, which sets out the four criteria for statehood that have been recognized by international organizations as an accurate statement of customary international law:
Furthermore, the first sentence of Article 3 explicitly states that "The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.
Official source
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