The purpose of this article is to examine the main legal questions that arise from the co-existence of two sets of international procedures for handling individual petitions: the system established by the Optional Protocol to the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, on the one hand, and two regional procedures within the framework of the Organization of American States, on the other.

In its decision in The Paquete Habana, the United States Supreme Court wrote that customary international law is part of the law of the United States to be administered by the courts, “where there is no treaty and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision.” The U.S. capture of the foreign fishing vessels in question was determined to have violated customary international law protecting enemy fishing vessels in time of war, and the Supreme Court ordered that compensatory damages were due. The remedy was ordered, notwithstanding the fact that the capture was undertaken to enforce a presidential proclamation establishing a naval blockade of Cuba. The arguments of the Solicitor General and the Assistant Attorney General supporting the capture went unheeded.

It is now an established principle of modern international law, that there exists in every independent State but one body of law. This body of law is administered by all the courts alike over all persons and things within its territorial limits. These courts, within the limits of their respective jurisdictions, do not discriminate between the various inhabitants of the State. The origin, nationality or religion of the people who appear before the courts is not questioned, and is not of any importance.

Exigent circumstances can extinguish or suspend a wide range of legal obligations. They may empower governments to seize property or quarantine individuals. They may excuse the nonperformance of private or public contractual obligations. And, of especial interest here, they may permit governments to deviate from their obligations under treaties or customary international law (CIL).

Since the end of the first World War, the predominant concern of international lawyers, as of statesmen and politicians, has been the horizontal widening of universal international law in a limited but vital sphere: the establishment and strengthening of inter-state covenants and international organizations which would eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the danger of increasingly destructive wars among the nations, by substituting for the traditional privileges of national sovereignty, i.e., war, reprisals and other acts of force applied at the discretion of the national states, covenants of restraint and methods of peaceful settlement.

The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, signed by the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the exchange of letters between the PLO Chairman and Israel’s Prime Minister, both agreed upon in September 1993, have set the stage for a process of reconciliation and the settlement of the long and bitter conflict over Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. The Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area established the date—May 4, 1999—by which a permanent agreement must enter into effect. So far, the negotiations between the two parties have concentrated mainly on institutional arrangements, such as the nature of the Palestinian administration during the interim period, and other matters of public interest. At this stage, the parties are not expected to address matters that directly affect the interests of individuals, including the right of individuals to regain possession of property left behind because of the hostilities, or to receive compensation for such property. The discussion of most of these private claims has been deferred to the final stage of the negotiations, concerning a permanent status agreement, which is due to commence no later than May 4, 1996.

The critics of public international law are legion. Some have decried its primitiveness. Others have denied even its existence. A few have expounded the need for a renovation, an entirely new approach, a new international law.

On May 25,2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus two Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child: the Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (Children in Armed Conflict Protocol) and the Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Pornography and Child Prostitution (Sale of Children Protocol).1 These instruments represent major advances in the international effort to strengthen and enforce norms for the protection of the most vulnerable children, who desperately need the world's attention. The Children in Armed Conflict Protocol deals realistically and reasonably with the difficult issues of minimum ages for compulsory recruitment, voluntary recruitment, and participation in hostilities. The Protocol raises the age for military conscription to eighteen from fifteen years, as stipulated under existing international law; obliges states parties to raise the minimum age for voluntary recruitment to an age above the current fifteen-year international standard; and requires states parties to take all feasible measures to ensure that personnel in their national armed forces who are not yet eighteen do not take a direct part in hostilities.

The purpose of this article is to bring up to date the present writer’s previous article on “The Depositary of International Treaties” published in this Journal, in the light of the deliberations of the United Nations Conference on the Law of Treaties in 1968 and 1969 and the changes there made in the texts. The relevant provisions now appear as Articles 76, 77 and 78 of the so-called Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, corresponding to Articles 71, 72 and 73 of the draft articles on the law of treaties of the International Law Commission.

The question of the legal basis for United Nations armed forces is one of immense practical significance for the future effectiveness of the organization in keeping the peace.

In an address before the 1949 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law this writer remarked that the laws governing captured enemy property have never been codified or collected in one place and are very difficult to find and apply. The lack of a handy tool in the field of captured property has been noted at times by others, including Professor H. A. Smith, formerly a colonel with the British 21st Army Group, who observed that the “law of booty is almost unwritten” and Judge Manley O. Hudson, who wrote some years ago in an editorial in this JOURNAL that the “literature on captured property and war booty seemed inadequate.”