In the first criminal piracy decision by a United States court in nearly a century, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the federal piracy statute’s reference to the “law of nations” explicitly ties the scope of the offense to evolving customary international law definitions of the crime. The court went on to find that under current customary and treaty law, attempted piracy falls within the scope of the international crime. In doing so, it joined several courts in nations around the world that have confronted the issue as a result of the outbreak of Somali piracy that began in 2008.

The 1946 Bermuda Agreement is the major model for the United States bilateral air transport agreements. The Chicago Convention of 1944 had failed to provide traffic rights for scheduled air carriers because the United States and the United Kingdom disagreed over economic regulation of international air transport. The agreement which these competitors made two years later at Bermuda rivaled the Chicago Convention in importance because its compromise formula became the key to the later bilateral air transport agreements upon which is based the existence of all international scheduled air transport.

A small 3-day meeting of international lawyers and other experts was convened by the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, in November 1986 to consider the current status of the right to leave any country, including one’s own, and to return to one’s country. The approximately 30 participants were from Costa Rica, Egypt, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Morocco, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Zambia.

The fifty-sixth session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights took place in Geneva from March 20 to April 28,2000, under the chairmanship of Ambassador Shambhu Ram Simkhada of Nepal. The delegations of fifty-three member states and ninety-one observer states werejoined by 1760 representatives of 224 nongovernmental organizations. The Commission ultimately adopted one hundred resolutions and decisions, three-fourths of them by consensus.

The First Conference of 1899 was an experiment for which there were precedents, although there was perhaps no single precedent like it in all respects. Congresses or conferences have been familiar since the Congress of Westphalia, which may be said to mark the conscious beginning of modern international relations, and at various times conferences or congresses have been called, usually at the end of war, to settle the terms of peace.

The Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice did not contain a clause regulating the procedure for its amendment. This was considered to be a “gap,” an “unfortunate lacuna.” This “gap” may or may not have been deliberate. It was certainly not a “genuine” gap. In spite of the absence of a provision on amendments, the law provided a clear though inconvenient answer to the question of how the Statute could be amended, namely, by unanimous consent of all parties to it. In 1928 proceedings for the introduction of some amendments were initiated. They were incorporated in a Protocol of Amendment in 1929. The difficulties which were encountered before the Protocol of Amendment entered into force in 1936 are now history and need not be dealt with here, the less so as they have been described in considerable detail in a recent book. The Protocol of Amendment did not remedy this defect of the original Statute. As Hudson has explained, this was due to the fact that the adhesion of the United States was proposed on condition that the Statute “shall not be amended without the consent of the United States.” Such a position could hardly be accorded to the United States unless it were also maintained for the other states which were parties.