This Note will examine developments in the practice of the United Nations secretary-general on reservations and declarations to treaties, particularly since 1994 when the Summary of Practice of the Secretary-General as Depositary of Multilateral Treaties was last updated. This period was marked by some notable developments in the previous practice, especially in connection with human rights treaties.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 (Vienna Convention) provides the framework for the functions of the secretary-general in his role as depositary of multilateral treaties. Most aspects of the law relating to reservations and declarations to treaties are also codified in the Vienna Convention.

Over five hundred multilateral treaties are deposited with the secretary-general. The complex requirements relating to these treaties and the concerns of the many disparate states that may undertake treaty actions with regard to them have significantly influenced his practice. He is also conscious of the political sensitivities surrounding his decisions and the need to protect his own integrity and impartiality.

Many governments are reluctant to submit disputes voluntarily to the International Court of Justice for binding adjudication. Only a few disputes are brought to the Court with the current agreement of all the parties. When that happens, no matter what the technical basis for the Court’s jurisdiction may be—a compromis, compulsory jurisdiction, or a compromissory clause in a substantive international agreement or an optional protocol—the Court’s jurisdiction is unlikely to be questioned. When the respondent state does not wish the dispute to be submitted to the Court, however, the applicant state must compel adjudication by relying on jurisdiction founded upon the respondent state’s consent given in the past. Consent may be found in declarations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court provided for in Article 36(2) of its Statute. Alternatively, such consent may be found under Articles 36(1) or 37, which permit jurisdiction to be based on compromissory clauses.

The length of time which has unfortunately (owing entirely to the procrastinations and backslidings of this reviewer) elapsed since the date when this (by any standards) most original and arresting work was first published in April, 1967, makes it scarcely necessary to supply that systematic description of its contents which, up to a point, any well-ordered review ought to seek to do,—for by this time all those who are interested in its subject matter will have read or at least looked through it. We shall therefore concentrate on those salient aspects of it which, even after the familiarity of three years has softened their outlines, still seem to stand out with special prominence.

The European Union's external border regime is a manifestation of continuing imperialism. It reinforces particular imaginaries of Europe's wealth as somehow innate (rather than plundered and extorted) and of Europeanness itself as whiteness—euphemistically packaged as a “European Way of Life” to be protected. This exposes international law's structural limitations—if not designs—as bound up with racial borders in the global context. In the wake of COVID-19 and with a climate apocalypse already underway, these realities need to be urgently ruptured and reimagined.

As a result of the expansion of Western trade during the nineteenth century following the industrial revolution, Western nations, ever eager for the coveted trade of the Orient, and stimulated by the need of finding new markets for their accumulating exports, pushed their insistent way into the Far East with new determination. There followed a series of treaties with Eastern potentates opening up new trading areas and clothing Western merchants with extraterritorial rights roughly similar to those enjoyed by foreigners under the Turkish Capitulations. Thus was born in the Orient the régime of extraterritoriality which in three quarters of a century was destined to become the focus of increasing disturbance and unrest in the Far Eastern world.

Friedrich Nottebohm was born at Hamburg, Germany, a German national by birth and remained a German national until 1939. Since 1905 he had resided in Guatemala, where he carried on prosperous activities in the fields of commerce, banking and plantation. At the end of March or the beginning of April, 1939, he left for Germany and applied in October, 1939, after the outbreak of the second World War, for naturalization in the Principality of Liechtenstein and was naturalized on October 13, 1939. From this moment on he conducted himself exclusively as a national of Liechtenstein, particularly with regard to Guatemala, where he returned in 1940. On October 19, 1943, he was arrested by Guatemalan authorities and turned over to the armed forces of the United States in Guatemala. He was deported to the United States and interned there for two years and three months. During his internment in this country, in 1944, fiftyseven legal proceedings were commenced against him in Guatemala, designed to confiscate all his movable and immovable properties. When he was released from internment in the United States in 1946 and wanted to return to Guatemala to take up the defense against all the litigations pending against him there, he was refused readmission to Guatemala. In 1946 he went to Liechtenstein, where he has resided ever since. In 1949, three years after he had made Liechtenstein his effective and permanent domicile, his properties in Guatemala were confiscated under Guatemalan law.

Sri Lanka's civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka's armed forces on a small strip of land in the island's northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter's rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian targets; and for many years the LTTE controlled large parts of northern and eastern Sri Lanka.

Given the long history of violent encounters between the Global North and the Global South, legal arguments concerning the use of force are a fertile ground for testing the virtues and limits of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) as a theory aspiring to “address the material and ethical concerns of Third World peoples.” This essay examines the usefulness and limits of TWAIL in the context of the “unwilling or unable” doctrine currently promoted by a series of Western scholars and states in order to expand the scope of application of the right to self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Adopting TWAIL’s impulse to historicize, this essay argues that the structure of this doctrine closely replicates the “standard of civilization” that informed international legal theory and practice throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, widespread resistance to the “unwilling or unable” doctrine indicates that the profound transformation of international law on the use of force after 1945 and the diffusion of sovereignty outside the West put into question certain methodological and political commitments of TWAIL.

The International Law Commission held its sixty-fifth session in Geneva from May 6 to June 7, and from July 8 to August 9, 2013, under the chairmanship of Bernd H. Niehaus (Costa Rica). The Commission devoted most of the sixty-fifth session to discussing three topics: immunity of state officials from foreign criminal jurisdiction, subsequent agreements and subsequent practice in relation to the interpretation of treaties, and protection of persons in the event of disasters. Notably, the Commission provisionally adopted three draft articles and commentaries identifying three categories of senior governmental officials—heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers—as entitled to immunity ratione personae from foreign criminal jurisdiction for their public or private acts, an immunity that ceases once they leave office.

If the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations, designated as “International Co-operation Year,” had fallen in 1964 rather than 1965, a general assessment of the evolution of international law and organization since the end of World War II would have justified a measure of cautious confidence. Mankind was still very far from having organized itself against the danger of aggression. The danger of the proliferation of nuclear arms remained without effective control, apart from a partial nuclear test ban to which both the United States and the Soviet Union were parties. The world’s largest state, Communist China, remained outside the United Nations and without diplomatic relations with the United States and a large number of other states. The United Nations remained without effective control in conflicts between major Powers. The special agencies of the United Nations and other international welfare organizations still lacked, with few exceptions, the legal and executive power to cope with the many urgent problems of mankind. In the two most vital and dangerous areas: the conservation of resources, and the stemming of the explosive growth in the world's population, international organization was still embryonic or altogether lacking. But these grave drawbacks and deficiencies.

The reunification of Germany raised a variety of public international law questions that have been subjected to extensive scholarly review in Germany, where the interest is naturally intense. This report is designed to bring before American and other international lawyers the basic facts and issues pertaining to that important event.

The core principle of modern world order is that aggressive attack is prohibited in international relations and that necessary and proportional force may be used in response to such an attack. This dual principle is embodied in Articles 2(4) and 51 of the United Nations Charter, Articles 21 and 22 of the revised Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) and virtually every modern normative statement about the use of force in international relations. Indeed, it is the most important principle to emerge in more than two thousand years of human thought about the prevention of war. In the contemporary world of conflicting ideologies and nuclear threat, no task is more important for international lawyers and statesmen than to maintain the integrity of this principle in both its critical—and reciprocal—dimensions: prohibition of aggression and maintenance of the right of effective defense.

Sensing that it might be an epilogue, as in fact it turned out to be, to his life’s work, Dr. Scott on April 1, 1939, wrote in the preface to the last of a long list of legal and scholarly volumes which bear his name as author or editor, as follows: “For nearly half a century, from the time of entering Harvard College until the present day, I have been deeply interested in the fundamental conceptions of law and of the state; and in later years it has been my good fortune to have had practical experience with the law of the state, and especially with the law of the international community.” Togive a brief account of any busy person’s life of fifty years would be difficult; to attempt to do so adequately for a man of Dr. Scott’s dynamic personality, vivid imagination, keen intellect, tireless energy, cultured mind, and human soul seems almost futile; for each of his active years one might write a separate article and not overdo the task.

The entry of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into the world community has renewed an old question in a new global setting: Is China a help or a hindrance to international law and order? What impact, if any, has China made upon the evolution of the Charter-based international legal order? Conversely, what impact, if any, has the international legal order had on the Chinese conception and practice of international law? China’s participation for over six years in the activities of the United Nations, the specialized agencies, and UN-sponsored conferences, many of which are engaged in the development and clarification of law, now makes it possible to subject the above questions to a disciplined behavioral analysis.

On January 13, 1942, eight governments-in-exile and the Free French National Committee adopted at London a resolution which pledges them to postwar punishment of every person guilty and responsible for certain criminal acts of violence committed by the German armies and their accomplices in occupied territories contrary to the law of war as formulated, in particular in the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 concerning land warfare, or as generally understood by the civilized world. Several of the signers of this document spoke of the acts in question as social or international crimes and intimated that new legal conceptions would govern responsibility for and punishment of them. It seems opportune, therefore, to reexamine the established legal principles relating to these issues and to inquire whether any new rules of international law have been accepted recently with regard to the legal nature and punishment of criminal acts of violence committed by members of the armed services of a nation contrary to the laws and customs of war.

After any close inquiry into the present authority of the rule of the threemile limitof territorial waters, the candid observer will probabjy come to the conclusion that therule, while not infrequently attacked in theory, is supreme in practice. Diplomatists seldom or never question it; professors occasionally do. In the actual conduct of affairs,it is seldom challenged, and never successfully so. It must be premised that in what follows there is left out of account altogether the question of bays and gulfs. This is a different and more difficult question which can best be treated separately.