Good Faith (Bona fide)
- Soft law — General principles of international law — Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties — Good faith — UN Charter
Published under the auspices of the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law under the direction of Rüdiger Wolfrum.
1 The Latin term bona fides, often also used in the inflected forms bonae fidei and bona fide, means good faith. The very wording already discloses a broad intent because of which the bona fides principle—even though being fundamental to more or less every legal system on a world scale—has often been criticized as ambiguous if not amorphous or elusive. However, limiting bona fides to a vague moral dimension or to its self-evident spirit of reasonableness would fall short of comprehending the principle’s historically and philosophically diversified content (see...