  The general form of the global conservation laws for $N$-body systems in the
first post-Newtonian approximation of general relativity is considered. Our
approach applies to the motion of an isolated system of $N$ arbitrarily
composed and shaped, weakly self-gravitating, rotating, deformable bodies and
uses a framework recently introduced by Damour, Soffel and Xu (DSX). We succeed
in showing that seven of the first integrals of the system (total mass-energy,
total dipole mass moment and total linear momentum) can be broken up into a sum
of contributions which can be entirely expressed in terms of the basic
quantities entering the DSX framework: namely, the relativistic individual
multipole moments of the bodies, the relativistic tidal moments experienced by
each body, and the positions and orientations with respect to the global
coordinate system of the local reference frames attached to each body. On the
other hand, the total angular momentum of the system does not seem to be
expressible in such a form due to the unavoidable presence of irreducible
nonlinear gravitational effects.
