The conception of a law common to the entire civilized world has received a new content and a practical interpretation through the recent development of international unions. The numerous private unions and associations for international purposes constitute a spontaneous grouping of men throughout the world who are interested in certain lines of enterprise — industrial, political, or scientific — which are not limited by national boundaries, but have the whole world for their field of action. The number of such associations already created is indeed surprising. Nearly every type of social effort for the promotion of the broader interests of mankind has been organized in this manner, so that there are literally hundreds of international unions and associations. These bodies hold periodical conferences for the interchange of opinions and the comparison of results, and in many cases they have established permanent bureaus or offices.

Persons with disabilities have historically been subjected to egregious human rights violations. Yet despite well-documented and widespread harms, one billion persons with disabilities remain largely neglected by the international laws, legal processes, and institutions that seek to redress those violations, including crimes against humanity (CAH). This Article argues for the propriety of prosecuting egregious and systemic human rights violations against persons with disabilities as a CAH, and, in addition, asserts the necessity of ensuring the accessibility of international criminal processes to those individuals. The UN Security Council's recent acknowledgement of the enhanced risk that persons with disabilities experience during armed conflict, the growing evidence of widespread human rights violations against them, and an ongoing effort to forge a UN convention on the prevention and punishment of CAH make these arguments especially timely.

In a parable drawn from The Trial, Franz Kafka once etched the following chilling profile:

Rules of origin are the criteria used to determine the nationality of a product. They are essential to implementing discriminatory trade policies, compiling economic statistics on trade flows, and marking a product with its country of origin. Rules of origin were easy-to-apply, uncontroversial tools of international trade as long as the parts of a product were manufactured and assembled primarily in one country and other effective protectionist mechanisms could be used.

With the preparations for the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year much in evidence, the long-standing dispute over the Antarctic shifts into a new phase. The preliminaries are nearly over. All of the nations seriously involved in the area are now in training for the exploratory and political (if not the legal) main events. In this study the lesser known Argentine and Chilean claims in the “American Quadrant” (0° to 90° West Longitude) will be given particular consideration, although the general legal propositions may be applied to the entire region. The purpose will be to set forth the major developments, the applicable law, and to suggest possible solutions, including those looked upon as more “political” than legal.

International commercial arbitration is being enthusiastically promoted throughout the international legal community. Congresses and conferences abound; over three hundred delegates attended the 1988 Tokyo conference of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration. New arbitration journals proliferate. New international arbitration centers compete for business, particularly around the Pacific Rim in such locations as Hong Kong (opened in 1985), Los Angeles (1985), Melbourne (1985) and Vancouver (1986).

It is the purpose of this paper to describe Canadian approaches toward international law, as they have evolved in recent years, particularly in relation to activities in outer space and “ocean space” made possible by new technological developments. It is intended to demonstrate both the similarities and the dissimilarities in these new approaches as compared with those followed by Canada in the past. Not within the scope of this study are questions about the validity of a particular point of view expressed by Canada, the extent to which new positions are well founded in the traditional concepts of international law, whether precedents for particular concepts are or are not correctly interpreted by Canada spokesmen and negotiators. What we are setting out to do is to observe and describe new Canadian attitudes toward international law and to evaluate their significance. History has not yet allowed us the privilege of a perspective in time. We plead this defense for the errors we may make in both interpretation and evaluation.

When, on October 24, 1983, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California handed down its decision in Timberlane Lumber Co. v. Bank of America and denied U.S. jurisdiction out of regard for the Honduran “system of justice,” there may have been some surprise that the case was still pending. The Timberlane decision of 1976 of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which remanded the matter to the district court, had already become a classic, even though it was preceded by the 1968 decision in United States v. First National City Bank on the production of documents located abroad. The Timberlane approach outlined by Judge Choy, under which the exercise of antitrust jurisdiction has to be restrained by a case-by-case analysis of various factors, was widely discussed (and usually praised) in legal writing, and was also followed by federal courts of the Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Circuits.

The International Law Commission held its sixty-fourth session in Geneva from May 7 to June 1, and from July 2 to August 3, 2012, under the chairmanship of Lucius Caflisch. The session marked the first year of a new quinquennium (2012–2016), with the Commission having completed its work during the prior quinquennium (2007–2011) on four major topics: transboundary aquifers, effects of armed conflict on treaties, reservations to treaties, and responsibility of international organizations.

Law in the twentieth century, no more than modern science, can be expected to stand still, especially in the developing area of international relations.

African indigenous peoples confront gross human rights violations, both on the macrolevel of the peoples as a whole, and on the microlevel of the individuals belonging to them. These violations relate to such issues as the right to self-determination; the ownership of land and natural resources, as part of their right to life; the existence of distinct political and economic institutions; discrimination; and lack of access to justice. Taking these and other violations as a starting point, this article focuses on whether the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Declaration),1 as adopted in 2007 by the United Nations General Assembly, might be instrumental in helping to solve these problems.

The Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (Preparatory Committee or committee) held its sixth and final session from March 16 to April 3, 1998, at the United Nations headquarters in New York. At this session it completed its work of preparing a consolidated text of a statute for a permanent international criminal court (ICC) for adoption at a diplomatic conference in Rome held from June 15 to July 17, 1998. The consolidated text is considerably longer than the draft statute submitted by the International Law Commission to the UN General Assembly in July 1994 (ILC draft statute) and contains many different options submitted by states, but it is still largely consistent with the basic structure of the ILC draft statute.

The Draft Articles on the Law of Treaties completed in 1966 by the International Law Commission and submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations, on the basis of proposals by the Special Rapporteur, Sir Humphrey Waldock, contain, in Part VII (entitled “Depositaries, Notifications, Corrections and Registration”), three articles—Articles 71, 72 and 73—dealing directly with the depositary of an international treaty; and throughout the Draft Articles are to be found other provisions which directly or indirectly relate to the same institution of contemporary international law and relations.