Any question answered...

Neither of them sound 'nice'. Can't you rewrite it?

The countries were all signatories to the treaty and..

I'd love to leave the bastards out as you suggest, but I'm already having to sort out garbled syntax every couple of lines and I have 40 pages of the stuff to do before 9am. So I probably shouldn't start trying to change the order of what are otherwise OK sentences...

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