Beginning with participation in the Cape Spartel Light Convention of May 31, 1865, the United States has become a party to about a hundred multipartite administrative treaties, including revisions and amendments of the same. The number of parties to a treaty varies with the treaty, from three or four, as in the case of the Fur Seals Convention of July 7, 1911, to ninety, as in the case of the Universal Postal Convention concluded at Cairo, March 20, 1934. The agreements, usually technical in character, deal with a variety of humanitarian, economic, and cultural subjects, ranging from agriculture to whales. Many of these agreements, such as those dealing with postal matters, publicity of customs documents, and publication of customs tariffs, are primarily of concern to administrative services.

1. In the course of the last decade, students of legal and economic questions have been attempting to throw some light on the problem of nationalizations in the Soviet satellite countries in general, and in Bulgaria in particular.

Before the Peoples Republic of China [PRC] was officially proclaimed on September 21, 1949, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party had proclaimed that the acts and foreign agreements of the Republic of China which resulted in the exploitation of China by foreigners were “completely contrary to the will of the Chinese people” and would not be honored. Although certain actions by the Chinese Communists indicated as early as February, 1949 that property owned by the U.S. Government and its nationals would be treated unfavorably by the new regime, no concerted steps were taken by the PRC against U.S. property until the United States had already placed an “embargo” on American trade with China. Only after Chinese troops had entered Korea and the U.S. Government had blocked and frozen all Chinese assets within its jurisdiction did the PRC freeze all public and private property of the United States in the PRC and order that an inventory of it be made. The PRC “assumed control of all U.S. property in China under a decree issued on December 29, 1950. ”

This past August, the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities welcomed 17 newly elected experts. In part, because of the large number of new members on the Sub-Commission, the session did not produce many major initiatives.

Land and Maritime Boundary between Cameroon and Nigeria (Cameroon v. Nigeria) , Preliminary Objections, Judgment.

International Court of Justice, June 11, 1998.

On March 29, 1994, Cameroon filed an Application requesting that the Court determine the question of sovereignty over the Bakassi Peninsula and a disputed parcel of land in the area of Lake Chad (principally Darak and its region) and to specify the course of the land and maritime boundary between Cameroon and Nigeria. It also asked the Court to order an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Nigerian troops from alleged Cameroonian territory in the disputed areas. As the basis of the Court's jurisdiction, Cameroon relied on the declarations made by the parties under Article 36, paragraph 2 of the ICJ Statute.

The bilateral negotiating process that has been developed to address the central problems of nuclear arms control has evolved to the point that it can be characterized as a proven mechanism for the negotiation of international agreements on these subjects. Even though the process was recently interrupted, and although it by no means represents the only vehicle available for the purpose, history demonstrates that employment of the methodical bilateral process can lead the way, under favorable political conditions, to the resolution of many of the difficult political and technical questions common to the field of nuclear arms control.

Writers on international law are now in substantial agreement that a belligerent ought not to detain enemy subjects, confiscate their property, or subject them to any disabilities, further than such as the protection of the national security and defense may require. Vattel, in 1758, appears to have been the first writer to adopt the view that had come to be generally held by publicists at the time the present war broke out. “The sovereign,” he said, “who declares war has not the right to detain the subjects of the enemy who are found within his state, nor their effects. They have come to his country in public faith; in permitting them to enter and live in the territory, he has tacitly promised them all liberty and surety for their return. A suitable time should be given them to withdraw with their goods; and if they stay beyond the time prescribed, it is lawful that they should be treated as enemies, though as disarmed enemies.” Alexander Hamilton, in defending the Jay Treaty of 1794, declared that the right of holding property in a country always implies a duty on the part of its government to protect that property and to secure to the owner full enjoyment of it. “Whenever, therefore,” he added, “a government grants permission to foreigners to acquire property within its territories, or to bring and deposit it there, it tacitly promises protection and security — the property of a foreigner placed in another country, by permission of its laws, may be justly regarded as a deposit of which the society is the trustee.” Westlake, in 1907, adverting to the numerous treaty stipulations on the subject, remarked that they might be deemed to amount to “a general agreement, on the part of governments, that modern international law forbids making prisoners the persons of enemy subjects in the territory at the outbreak of war, or, saving the right of expulsion in case of apprehended danger to the state, refusing them the right of continuous residence during good behavior.” Referring to the right of expulsion, Ullmann, a respectable German authority, remarks that expulsion can be resorted to against the subjects of the enemy state, but only after a suitable delay has been offered in order to enable those affected to wind up their affairs.

On May 12, 1981, the President of the International Court of Justice ordered the discontinuance of the Case concerning United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran (United States of America v. Iran) (Hostages case). Following the indication of provisional measures in December 1979 and the Judgment in May 1980, the present Order ended the proceedings in the case. This is the first order to apply the (Revised) Rules of Court of 1978 concerning the discontinuance of proceedings. It therefore appears to be an appropriate time to comment on this topic of international procedure.

On July 3, 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes, already involved in an exchange of fire with a group of Iranian naval craft (Boghammar boats) in the international waters of the Persian Gulf, shot down an unidentified aircraft that had just departed from the joint military-civilian airfield at Bandar-e Abbas After repeated, unsuccessful efforts by the Vincennes to establish contact with the unidentified aircraft, the captain, believing that his vessel might be attacked within minutes by an Iranian military aircraft sent to assist the gunboats engaged in the surface exchange, ordered the still unidentified aircraft to be fired upon. The aircraft was shot down, and was only afterwards identified as a civil airliner, Iran Air Flight 655. The incident resulted in the deaths of 290 individuals from six nations.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which met from January 28 to March 8, 1991, in the shadow of the gulf war, nevertheless completed what many observers considered its most productive session in recent history. The Commission took action on a record of nineteen country situations—creating new rapporteurs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait—began plans for a 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and set up an intersessional working group to complete a draft declaration on disappearances. The most important long-term accomplishment of the Commission, however, was the creation of a five-member working group to investigate cases of arbitrary detention throughout the world.

We are now approaching the end of the first decade following the World War. Perhaps we are sufficiently removed from the heat and passion of that struggle to attempt to gauge the progress which the world has made in the development of international law since it was ended. Ten years is a brief period in any field of history; but before this decade was begun, most of us felt that it was going to see great things accomplished toward broadening and strengthening and extending the law by which the relations of states are governed. The war brought a challenge to our international legal order which could hardly have failed to create for our generation an opportunity to leave an impression on international law, such as has been left by no other generation in the three hundred years since the time of Grotius. As the decade is ending, and as our generation begins to find its energies so absorbed in other tasks, an appraisal of the progress we have achieved may enable us to judge the use we have made of our opportunity and the extent to which it still exists.

The word “copyright” comes from the Latin copia, which is translated as “plenty” and which means, in general, the right to make plenty or to copy. In its specific application it means the right to multiply copies of those products of the human brain known as literature and art. It has also been defined as “the power to determine whether the work shall be published at all, the manner in which, if published, it shall be done, and to whom.”