Soft law as an avenue for legal harmonization : a Belgian perspective

Abstract

The decision to approve the United Nations Global Compact for Migration plunged Belgium’s federal government in a political crisis that would even- tually bring its coalition of parties to an early end. Consequently, in 2018, a dishevelled Belgian Prime Minister addressed the United Nations Conference in Marrakesh to express Belgium’s support for the Global Compact whilst having lost its parliamentary majority at home. In an unhappy attempt to defuse this crisis, many hurried to point out that the instrument at hand was not meant to be binding upon the signatories: as a purely ‘soft’ agreement, it contains political principles—mere accords de principe—and nothing more. Surely, the argument goes, we should not break off a governmental coalition, which we struggled to establish in the first place (as is so often the case in recent Belgian history), over the signature of a mere political declaration that has no legal effects. This is true, but the argument is only half fair. Whatever the merits of the Global Compact and the—much less obvious—merits of Belgian political tribulations, it became clear that soft law instruments can make and break domestic governmental coalitions. Less anecdotically perhaps, it is also clear that soft law instruments matter too much to simply let go. It is important to study the role that they play on the international and the domestic plane; the following pages are intended to contribute to this study.