Forthcoming in the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (27) After several years of discussions in both the ILC’s plenary and drafting committee, including nine reports by the special rapporteur, the Commission finally adopted thirty-one draft articles on second reading, together with commentaries. 109 The 2014 Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens tried to strike a balance between codification and progressive development in a particularly contentious area of the law. So much so that the ILC felt the need to reaffirm that the draft articles embodied rules ‘established by certain treaty regimes or firmly established in customary international law, although some of them constitute progressive development of international law’.110 The draft articles set out by recognizing the ‘sovereign’, yet qualified right of states to expel non-nationals from its territory, which must be performed within the boundaries demarcated by, and in compliance with, the said draft articles and ‘other applicable rules’.111 While this ‘without prejudice’ clause might at first evoke problems of conflict of norms and international lawmaking, 112 its main purpose is to situate the draft articles within a broader legal environment. As the commentary to Draft Art. 3 makes clear, by expressly mentioning other rules, the Commission wanted to emphasize ‘the importance that respect for human rights assumes in the context of expulsion’ which is also ‘underlined by the many provisions of the draft articles devoted to various aspects of the protection of the human rights of aliens subject to expulsion’.113 This is also confirmed by the wording of Draft Art. 13(2), which provides that all aliens subject to expulsion ‘are entitled to respect for their human rights, including those set out in the present draft articles’. Still, it is unclear how one would solve a possible conflict between the draft articles and such ‘other applicable rules’. UN ILC, ‘Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens, with Commentaries’ in Yearbook of the International Law Commission 2011, vol. II (Part Two) UN Doc. A/CN.4/SER.A/2011/Add.1. 110 Ibid., at 6. 111 UN ILC, ‘Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens’, at Art. 3. 112 See generally M. Forteau, ‘A New “Baxter Paradox”? Does the Work of the ILC on Matters Already Governed by Multilateral Treaties Necessarily Constitute a Dead End? Some Observations on the ILC Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens’ (2016) Harvard Human Rights Law Journal 1. 113 UN ILC, ‘Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens’, at 6. 109 28 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4816199