Reservation

A reservation is a unilateral statement by which a state purports to exclude or modify the legal effect of certain treaty provisions when consenting to be bound. Most IMO technical conventions restrict or exclude reservations to preserve uniform application: a fragmented safety or pollution standard would defeat the convention’s purpose. Where a convention is silent, the default rules of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties apply, allowing reservations not incompatible with the object and purpose. The practical effect for IMO instruments is near-uniform acceptance of the full technical text.