Development of conference rules of procedure

Sohn points out that at the 1868 Geneva Conference ‘a distinction seems to have been made for the first time between matters of substance and questions of procedure’. The Congress of Berlin of 1878 however is usually regarded as the first conference where a clear distinction was made between decisions on substance and those of procedure. It was there that Bismarck declared:

Despite these two examples and additional cases of adoption of ad hoc procedural decisions, Pastuhov writes that it ‘was not the practice of diplomatic conferences held prior to the twentieth century to adopt formal rules of procedure for conducting their business’. Although the First Hague Conference of 1899 voted on procedural issues, it did not have a formal set of rules of procedure; the first conference with a formal set of rules of procedure appears to have been the Second Hague Conference of 1907. The rules of the Second Hague Conference consisted of twelve short articles dealing with the structure and organisation. Only two of the articles dealt with the process of conduct of business and voting.