The Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decisions of Aug 31, 2026, in the Indus Waters Western Rivers Arbitration mark a significant development not only for Pakistan and India, but also for the broader international legal order governing relations between states. At the centre of the dispute was a question with implications far beyond the waters of the Indus basin: can one state unilaterally place a binding bilateral treaty in abeyance simply because political relations with the other party have deteriorated?

The Court’s answer was unequivocal. It held unanimously that the Indus Waters Treaty remains fully in force and that India’s April 2025 decision to place the Treaty in abeyance had no legal basis under either the Treaty or international law. For Pakistan, this substantially vindicates the legal position it had maintained from the outset. But the importance of the ruling lies equally in the principles of international law the Court has reaffirmed.

International relations depend heavily upon the predictability of treaties. States enter agreements precisely because political circumstances change, governments come and go, disputes arise and relations sometimes deteriorate sharply. If one party could suspend its obligations by inventing a political formulation such as abeyance, the reliability of bilateral........

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