Reading the PPED Backwards: What the French Draft Says

I was reading 18 articles. Two versions of one text, English and French, each in the language of a different legal tradition. I read the French, then I read the English, and I realized they were not saying the same thing.

Not because anyone made a mistake. Because the two versions, at several points, make different choices about what needs to be said explicitly. I wanted to know whether those choices were the drafters’ or the languages’.

The International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters, the text on which the General Assembly has decided to elaborate a convention at a conference now set for Bangkok in January and February 2027, exist in six official UN languages. They are not yet a treaty, and none of the six versions is an “authentic text” in the treaty-law sense; that status comes only when States authenticate what they adopt. Two of them are my working pair, and it is between those two that the questions arose.

Read the English first, and you see a humanitarian framework. Read the French first, like me, reading the PPED backwards, and you see the places where the two versions diverge, and you want to know why.

The affected State

Start with Article 3(b). The English defines the “affected State,” a term so natural, so intuitive, that no English-speaking reader would pause over it. The French did pause, between two readings rather than in one sitting. The text the Commission adopted on first reading in 2014 said État affecté. The final text of 2016 says État touché, and the change went beyond States: personnes affectées in 2014 became personnes touchées in 2016.

In French international legal discourse, État affecté has a home in transboundary environmental law: the Commission’s own 2001 articles on the prevention of transboundary harm define the État susceptible d’être affecté, the neighbor on the receiving end of someone else’s hazardous activity. The commentary says the definition of the affected State was inspired by the IFRC Guidelines, whose French says État touché; it borrows the phrase “in territory under whose jurisdiction or control” from those same 2001 articles; and it says nothing about the adjective. Nor does the Drafting Committee’s statement of 2016, which reworked this definition more than any other, to make the territorial link clear and to limit which States could count as affected.

So what does touché do? It denotes direct impact on a State’s own territory. The disaster happened here, to us, and the response begins here. It is also the word the humanitarian French already used, from pays touché in General Assembly resolution 46/182 onward, so aligning with it would have been an ordinary terminology decision.

The French did, notably, add one word of its own. The English affected State is “a State in whose territory, or in territory under whose jurisdiction or control, a disaster takes place.” The French is un État victime d’une catastrophe qui survient sur son territoire. Victime is not a neutral word in UN legal French: elsewhere it names the State attacked, or the State wronged by another State’s act. Applied to a disaster, an event with no wrongdoer, it casts the State as the party that suffered, where the English only says where the event took place. That is a difference of emphasis written into the final text. Whether the word was chosen with that in mind, the record does not say.

The same second reading changed another word I had noticed. The 2014 French object clause promised une réaction adéquate et efficace aux catastrophes; the 2016 text says une réponse, and the 2014 phrase en réagissant aux catastrophes, which opened the article on human dignity, disappeared from both languages at the same time. The Commission had explained the participle (it conveyed an obligation continuing throughout the response period) in both languages, about “responding to” as much as about réagissant. Nothing temporal separates the two versions here: Article 2 names the reduction of disaster risk alongside the response in English and in French alike. What remains is the same fact as with touché: the French terminology settled late, and the reasons are unrecorded.

Splitting “duty” in two

The English text uses the word “duty” twice in quick succession. Article 10: the affected State has the “duty to ensure” protection of persons on its territory. Article 11: when a disaster exceeds national capacity, the affected State has the “duty to seek” external assistance. A reader of the English might assume these are two expressions of the same kind of obligation.

The French text says otherwise — or seems to. Article 10 renders “duty” as devoir: l’État touché a le devoir d’assurer la protection des personnes. Article 11 renders it as obligation: l’État touché a l’obligation de rechercher l’assistance. (Article 7, the duty to cooperate, is an obligation too.) In French legal usage the two words are not synonyms. A devoir is a sovereign imperative: the State protects its people because protecting them is what statehood means. An obligation is a legal bond, a vinculum juris, with consequences for non-compliance.

That is what a French reader hears. The Commission’s own commentary hears something else. Its French commentary on Article 10 opens by saying that paragraph 1 exprime l’obligation de l’État touché de protéger les personnes: the very paragraph that says devoir is described, one line later, as an obligation. The commentary on Article 11 calls the duty to seek assistance a specification of Articles 7 and 10, and uses devoir and obligation for both within the same paragraph. The split was already there in 2014, so it is no second-reading refinement either. The one choice of term the Commission does record is a different one: it preferred “duty” to “responsibility,” which “could be misunderstood given its use in other contexts.”

So the variation is real, and it is visible only in French. Why devoir in Article 10 alone? Until 2016 that sentence said the State held the duty en vertu de sa souveraineté, and the commentary surrounds it with the classical vocabulary of sovereign rights and duties, down to a footnote quoting Max Huber in Island of Palmas: sovereignty has as its corollary un devoir : l’obligation de protéger. Huber defines the devoir as an obligation; the Commission’s French follows him. Devoir, then, is an echo of that vocabulary; a matter of register. I found nothing that gives it different legal force. I would still flag it in a revision note, as a question: a term that varies inside one instrument is a term a tribunal may one day be asked about.

Ne saurait

Article 13(2) may be the most consequential sentence in the entire instrument. The English states: “Consent to external assistance shall not be withheld arbitrarily.” Standard prohibitive language; shall not is the workhorse of treaty drafting. The French reads: Le consentement à l’assistance extérieure ne saurait être refusé arbitrairement.

Ne saurait. To a French ear this is the formal, elevated way a legal text states what may not happen, and it carries a note of moral obligation that shall not lacks: this is a thing a State does not do, as much as a thing it is forbidden to do. I would defend that reading of the register, and I would stop there; the record shows why. The 2014 French said ne peut pas être refusé arbitrairement, a plain prohibition. The change to ne saurait came at second reading, and the Drafting Committee recorded paragraph 2 as adopted “without change to the first reading text”: whatever the French rewording did, the Commission did not treat it as a change of substance. Its own French commentary still paraphrases the paragraph with ne peut pas, and both commentaries say the affected State’s right to refuse an offer “is not unlimited.” The pairing has a precedent, too: in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, quoted in the commentary, consent “shall not be arbitrarily withheld” in English and the services ne sauraient être refusés arbitrairement in French.

The more interesting word is the verb. The English says withheld; the French says refusé. You can withhold consent by saying no, or by not answering. Refuser names the no. And here the French commentary does something I have rarely seen a commentary do: it concedes the gap and borrows the English word to close it. Paragraph 7 of the commentary on Article 13: La détermination du caractère arbitraire du refus fait intervenir un élément temporel, comme le sous-entend le terme anglais « withheld ». Both commentaries then add that failing to make a decision known within a reasonable time, as paragraph 3 requires, may itself be deemed arbitrary, just as an outright refusal may. The English reader gets that from the verb. The French reader gets it from the commentary.

That also settles the doit of paragraph 3, which looks at first like a deliberate contrast with paragraph 2: paragraph 7 ties the two together instead, since silence under paragraph 3 can be arbitrary withholding under paragraph 2. And it leaves one question open. If a convention keeps refusé, will the temporal element travel with it? What weight the ILC commentary will carry once States negotiate their own text is a question for treaty lawyers. If I were translating that convention, refusé on its own is where I would raise a query.

What reading backwards taught me

Some of these divergences the commentaries address head on; “withheld” most of all. Others they pass over. What the record shows is a French version revised more than the English between 2014 and 2016 (affecté to touché and affectées to touchées, réaction to réponse, ne peut pas to ne saurait), with the reasons unrecorded.

The two are official versions of one text, on an equal footing as documents, whatever the order in which they were written. What the French carries is the habits of legal French: the present indicative where the English says shall, ne saurait where it says shall not, obligation and devoir where it says duty, victime where the English merely locates the disaster; and, in one place, withheld, a word the French commentary had to borrow. Every one of those is worth a translator’s pause.

If a convention comes out of Bangkok, its words will carry legal force in whichever languages the States authenticate, and Article 33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties will presume that those versions mean the same thing, reconciling any difference in the light of the treaty’s object and purpose. A translator’s work comes afterward, when everything written around the convention, from guidance to reports, has to be rendered with the authenticated texts in hand and these EN–FR differences in mind.

Updated 27 September 2026. The diplomatic conference, planned for Manila when this article was first published on 5 April 2026, now meets in Bangkok from 25 January to 12 February 2027.

Reading the PPED Backwards: A Translator’s Reading of the French and English Draft Articles

The affected State

Splitting “duty” in two

Ne saurait

What reading backwards taught me

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