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A secret treaty is a treaty (international agreement) in which the contracting Sovereign state parties have agreed to conceal the treaty's existence or substance from other states and the public.Helmut Tichy and Philip Bittner, "Article 80" in Olivier Dörr & Kirsten Schmalenbach (eds.) Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: a Commentary (Springer, 2012)), 1339, at 1341, note 11. Such a commitment to keep the agreement secret may be contained in the Legal instrument itself or in a separate agreement.
According to one compilation of secret treaties published in 2004, there have been 593 secret treaties negotiated by 110 countries and independent political entities since the year 1521.Chad M. Kahl, International Relations, International Security, and Comparative Politics: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources (Greenwood, 2008), pp. 206-207. Secret treaties were highly important in the balance of power diplomacy of 18th and 19th century Europe, but are rare today.Lipson, pp. 237-228.
Secret treaties have been prevalent in authoritarian states where rulers use the treaties to suppress domestic opposition and unrest.
The use of "secret agreements and undertakings between several allies or between one state and another" continued throughout World War I. Some of them were irreconcilably inconsistent, "leaving a bitter legacy of dispute" at the end of the war.Grenville, p. 61. Some important secret treaties of the era include the one for the German–Ottoman alliance, which was concluded in Constantinople on August 2, 1914.Grenville, pp. 62–63. Treaty of Alliance Between Germany and Turkey 2 August, 1914. That treaty provided that Germany and Turkey would remain neutral in the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but if Russia intervened "with active military measures", both countries would become military allies. Another important secret treaty was the Treaty of London, concluded on April 26, 1915, in which Italy was promised certain territorial concessions in exchange for joining the war on the Triple Entente (Allied) side.Grenville, p. 63. Another secret treaty was the Treaty of Bucharest, concluded between Romania and the Triple Entente powers (Britain, France, Italy, and Russia) on August 17, 1916 in which Romania pledged to attack Austria-Hungary and not to seek a separate peace in exchange for certain territorial gains.Grenville, pp. 63–66. Article 16 of that treaty provided, "The present arrangement shall be held secret."Grenville, p. 66.
US President Woodrow Wilson was an opponent of secret diplomacy and viewed it as a threat to peace. He made the abolition of secret diplomacy the first point of his Fourteen Points, set forth in a speech to Congress, on January 8, 1918, after the country had entered the war. Wilson "dissociated the United States from the Allies' earlier secret commitments and sought to abolish them forever once the war had been won".Lipson, p. 329. The Fourteen Points were based on a draft paper prepared by Walter Lippmann and his colleagues on the Inquiry, Isaiah Bowman, Sidney Mezes, and David Hunter Miller.Godfrey Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 160–163. Lippmann's draft was a direct response to the secret treaties, which Lippman had been shown by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Lippman's task was "to take the secret treaties, analyze the parts which were tolerable, and separate them from those which we regarded as intolerable, and then develop a position which conceded as much to the Allies as it could, but took away the poison. ... It was all keyed upon the secret treaties. That's what decided what went into the Fourteen Points."
Wilson repeated his Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference, where he proposed a commitment to "open covenants ... openly arrived at" and the elimination of "private international understandings of any kind so diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view". The Wilsonian position was codified in Article 18 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which mandated that all League of Nations members states register every treaty or international agreement with the League secretariat and that no treaty was binding unless so registered. Covenant of the League of Nations, art 18. That led to the rise of the treaty registration system "although not every treaty that would have been subject to registration was duly registered".
One of the most infamous secret treaties in history was the Additional Secret Protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which was negotiated by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (Vintage Books, 2007), p. 50–56. The pact itself, a ten-year non-aggression agreement, was public, but the Additional Secret Protocol, superseded by a similar secret protocol, the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty, the next month, carved up spheres of influence in Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and placed Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Bessarabia (part of Romania), and eastern Poland in the Soviet sphere and western Poland and Lithuania in the German sphere. The existence of the secret protocol was not confirmed until 1989. When it became public, it caused outrage in the Baltic states although they had suspected its existence.David J. Smith et al., The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Routledge, 2002), pp. 44–45.John Crazplicka, Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Duke University Press, 2004; eds. Daniel Walkowit & Lisa Maya Knauer).
The percentages agreement was a secret pact between Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the Fourth Moscow Conference in October 1944 on how to divide various European countries among the leaders' respective spheres of influence. The agreement was officially made public by Churchill twelve years later in the final volume of his memoir of the Second World War. David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester University Press, 2000) p. 114–116.
Similarly, Article 80 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (which entered into force in 1980) requires a party to the convention to register any treaty to which it is a party once the treaty enters into force.Anthony Aust, Modern Treaty Law and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 275., art. 80. However, neither Article 102 of the UN Charter nor Article 80 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties has preserved the latter part of Article 18 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Consequently, failure to register a treaty "as soon as possible" is a violation of the Charter and Convention, but does not render the treaty invalid or ineffective.
Over the years, the UN has developed an extensive treaty-registration system, detailed in its Repertory of Practice and Treaty Handbook.Dörr & Schmalenbach, pp. 1340–1341. From December 1946 through July 2013, the United Nations Secretariat recorded over 200,000 treaties published in the United Nations Treaty Series pursuant to Article 102 of the UN Charter. "Overview", United Nations Treaty Collection. Still, today "a substantial number of treaties are not registered, mainly due to practical reasons, such as the administrative or ephemeral charter of some treaties".Dörr & Schmalenbach, p. 1341. Non-registered treaties are not necessarily secret, since such treaties are often published elsewhere.
Some true secret treaties still exist, however, mostly in the context of agreements to establish foreign military bases.Dörr & Schmalenbach, p. 1341, note 12. For example, after the 1960 Security Treaty between the U.S. and Japan, the two nations entered into three agreements that (according to an expert panel convened by the Japanese Foreign Ministry) could be defined as secret treaties, at least in a broad sense.Jeffrey Lewis, More on US-Japan "Secret Agreements", Arms Control Wonk (March 11, 2010). These agreements involved the transit and storage of nuclear weapons by U.S. forces in Japan despite Japan's formal non-nuclear weapons policy. Prior to their public release in 2010, the Japanese government had gone so far as convicting journalist Nishiyama Takichi, who tried to expose one treaty, for espionage.Martin Fackler, "Japanese Split on Exposing Secret Pacts With U.S.", The New York Times (February 8, 2010). Operation Condor was a secret treaty between the US and five South American nations to coordinate counter-insurgency and "Dirty War" against communist rebels and other leftists in Latin America.
According to Dörr & Schmalenbach's commentary on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, "the fact that today secret treaties do not play an essential role is less a result of Article than of an overall change in the conduct of international relations".
According to Charles Lipson:
With private international understandings "virtually eliminated" among democratic states, informal agreements "live on as their closest modern substitutes".
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