The Senate on March 16, 1961, by a vote of 72 to 18, advised and consented to the ratification of the Convention on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and its three protocols signed at Paris December 14, 1960. The Organization is a consultative forum capable of initiating agreements on the use and development of economic resources, on removing obstacles to trade and current payments, on liberalization of capital movements, on the flow of capital to less developed countries. The 20 signatories are the industrialized states of Europe, Canada and the United States. A vociferous opposition to the convention by interests that erroneously thought it might reduce tariffs was heard by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Whether on that account or because they realized the importance of the convention itself, members of that committee in two executive sessions carefully probed official spokesmen to satisfy themselves that the convention did not affect the powers of the President or Congress. As a consequence, the resolution approving the convention took this unusual form:

The fifty-first session of the UN Human Rights Commission took place in Geneva from January 30 to March 10, 1995, under the genial chairmanship of Musa bin Hitam of Malaysia.’ The Commission showed that great powers are not exempt from critical consideration by the UN human rights machinery, addressing human rights situations involving three permanent members of the Security Council: China, Russia and die United States.

The Commission closed the book on its years of activity concerning South Africa. Indigenous issues assumed a higher profile. The Commission took a cautious look at whether it had a role in the important “gray area” of internal armed conflict. In a controversial move, it created a new Special Rapporteur on human rights and toxic wastes.

All humanitarian action takes place in a political context, and has, therefore, a political content. This means that all “humanitarian” organizations, such as those operating under the sig of the Red Cross, have a duty to define a humanitarian policy which will be valid in the long term, based on a thorough analysis of the political context, the main characteristics of an epoch, the political societies of our time, and the world political system. Such a humanitarian policy entails in turn the development of a humanitarian strategy which is distinct from the tactical moves imposed by varying crises. Neglect of this work of reflection leads to contradiction and confusion and, worse still, the degradation of humanitarian action to the level of a political instrument.

Lance Paul Larsen v. The Hawaiian Kingdom. At <http://www.pca-cpa.org>.

Permanent Court of Arbitration Tribunal, February 5, 2001.

In Larsen v. The Hawaiian Kingdom Lance Paul Larsen, a resident of the state of Hawaii, sought redress from the Hawaiian Kingdom for its failure to protect him from the United States and the State of Hawaii. The parties, who agreed to submit their dispute to arbitration by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), shared similar goals and wished the Arbitral Tribunal (Tribunal) to address the question of the international legal status of Hawaii.

Huig de Groot, whom we know and venerate under the Latinized name of Hugo Grotius, is not a man with one book to his credit; but lawyers of all parts of the world are celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of one work of his, De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres. It appeared, it would seem, sometime in the month of March, 1625. For many years it was looked upon as a tour deforce, as an extraordinary achievement for a politician in exile and a humanist to his finger-tips to have turned off within the space of a few months a treatise on a dry and admittedly technical subject, whose principles were ill-defined and, where known, were treated with scant respect.

The incidents of the great war now raging affect so seriously the very foundations of international law that there is for the moment but little satisfaction to the student of that science in discussing specific rules. Whether or not Sir Edward Carson went too far in his recent assertion that the law of nations has been destroyed, it is manifest that the structure has been rudely shaken. The barriers that statesmen and jurists have been constructing laboriously for three centuries to limit and direct the conduct of nations toward each other, in conformity to the standards of modern civilization, have proved too weak to confine the tremendous forces liberated by a conflict which involves almost the whole military power of the world and in which the destinies of nearly every civilized state outside the American continents are directly at stake.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld seemed a promising example of a special form of judicial role. Abstaining from deploying its ultimate power to judge the constitutionality of an action of a political branch, the United States Supreme Court used statutory construction to give a strong nudge in a direction favorable to human rights. It negated a questionable and controversial policy—President George W. Bush’s unilateral establishment of military commissions to try terrorist suspects by means of reduced procedures—and essentially remanded the matter to Congress. The initial fruits of that remand, the Military Commissions Act (MCA), came as a disappointment. The Act cuts back on judicial review of the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and other U.S. detention sites overseas; it limits certain key protections available to the accused in a military commission proceeding, as compared to courts-martial; and it takes a crabbed view of the requirements of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions—at least as applied to the actions of U.S. agents. Nonetheless, further judicial and congressional reconsideration is certainly possible—and highly desirable.