Mr. Chairman, President Rogers, Professor McDougal, Judge Hack-worth, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen: When Steve Schwehel called me up over long distance I was peacefully having supper at the Promenade Hotel in The Hague. He asked me if I would quickly pinch-hit for Manfred Lachs, who had accepted but was laid low by illness. I accepted in a mood of exuberant indiscretion. I did not know then that my good friend, Myres McDougal, would steal most of the time theoretically allocated for what is called the major address of the evening. However, I forgive him because of his gracious allusion to Mrs. Dillard. This is the kind of thing we Southerners indulge in with the grace and respect for the amenities for which we are renowned.

The injection of nuclear armaments and modern delivery systems into Communist world strategy, together with shifts in the balance of world political and economic power, have caused basic revisions in Soviet theories of war, politics, and international law.

On September 8 of last year Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim requested tlie inclusion in the agenda of the 27th session of the General Assembly of an item on “Measures to prevent terrorism and other forms of violence which endangers or takes innocent human lives or jeopardizes fundamental freedoms.” The Secretary-General’s request was triggered by the kidnaping and killing of eleven Israeli athletes participating in the Olympiad—a time for the brotherhood of man radier than the inhumanity of man. In a larger sense, however, the Secretary-General’s request was a response to an alarming worldwide increase in attacks against civil aviation, internationally protected persons, and the transportation and communication ties which bind us togedier.

The operation of public international organizations and the development of that sector of substantive international law which such organizations administer require that an effective mechanism exist for the authoritative interpretation of their basic instruments.

The Immigration Act of 1924 provides that, with certain exceptions, “no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States,” and carefully defines the term “ineligible to citizenship.”

The foreign relations of China may be said to begin with the year 1689, when the first treaty, consisting of six articles, was concluded with Russia at Nerchinsk. Although several embassies from Europe made their way to China by land and sea in the 17th and the 18th centuries, regular diplomatic relations were not established till the spring of 1861, when the diplomatic representatives of Great Britain and France took up their residence in the southeastern part of the inner city of Peking, now known as Legation Street. On the 19th of January, 1861, an Imperial Edict was issued, commanding the formation of a new bureau, named the Tsungli Yamên, for the administration of foreign affairs. By the terms of the Protocol of 1901, the Tsungli Yamên was transformed from a bureau or commission into a regularly constituted ministry or department, taking precedence over the then six other ministries of state, and has since been called the Waiwu Pu, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The ultimate authority of the International Court of Justice flows from the same source as the ultimate authority of all other judicial bodies. Every court’s decisions are an authoritative source of law in a realistic sense only because they are accepted as such by the community whose controversies the court is charged to resolve. In the case of the World Court, it is the community of nations that confers that authority and under the Court’s Statute, its jurisdiction is conferred solely by the consent of the nations whose disputes it is called to adjudicate. It is for this reason that the case Nicaragua v. United States and the actions of both the Court and the United States Government in connection with it are of special importance to those who are concerned with international law.

On June 29, 1993, President William J. Clinton transmitted to the Senate, for advice and consent to ratification, the Convention on the Marking of Plastic Explosives for the Purpose of Detection, with Technical Annex, done at Montreal on March 1, 1991. The Convention is aimed at precluding the recurrence of incidents such as the terrorist bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, and UTA (Union de Transports Aériens) Flight 172 over Niger in September 1989, as well as other incidents in which plastic explosives were utilized. To this end, it requires states producing such explosives to mark them at the time of manufacture with a substance enhancing their detectability by commercially available mechanical or canine detectors. The Convention also requires states to ensure the implementation of controls over the sale, use, and disposition of marked and unmarked plastic explosives.

Germany is preparing to rehabilitate her industry and commerce after the war shall end and the entire world is interested in knowing what plans for rehabilitation she will adopt. There are two types of commercial policy which have opposite effects on the countries immediately involved and on the remainder of the world.

A well-known English judge declared three decades ago that “an alien ami is never exlex . . . whatever rights he has he can enforce by law just as an ordinary subject can.” Nor was this a new thought at that time. More than a hundred years earlier a prominent American judge had affirmed that: