In recent years, the Congress of the United States has enacted a series of laws criminalizing certain activities committed outside the territory of the United States, even by persons who are not nationals of the United States. The international lawyer would doubtless characterize those laws as assertions by the United States of authority to exercise jurisdiction to prescribe laws on the basis of the principle of “passive personality”—to punish actions directed at the state’s nationals—or perhaps as new applications of principles of universal jurisdiction; one might then examine those laws in the light of recent developments in the international law governing state jurisdiction to prescribe.

Accountability for crimes, a theme central to Shakespeare’s plays, is also extraordinarily pertinent to our times. Newspapers have reported on the care taken by the leaders of the former Yugoslavia to order atrocities against “enemy” populations only in the most indirect and euphemistic way. Even the Nazi leaders constantly resorted to euphemisms in referring to the Holocaust. No explicit written order from Hitler to carry out the final solution has ever been found. At the height of their power, the Nazis treated the data on the killing of Jews as top secret. Similarly, a high-ranking member of the former security police told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that written instructions to kill antiapartheid activists were never given; squad members who carried out the killings simply got “a nod of the head or a wink-wink kind of attitude.”

For all their greatness, democracies historically have difficulty in perceiving and deterring totalitarian aggression. William Stevenson reminds us in A Man Called Intrepid that debate raged within the United States as to whether we should enter World War II on the side of England even after the rest of Europe had fallen to the Nazis. The American ambassador to England cautioned against such entry, arguing that England was militarily doomed. President Roosevelt, who had months earlier secretly committed U.S. intelligence assets to British support, felt that he did not have the necessary popular support to enter the war. And the British were so concerned about American indecisiveness that even after Pearl Harbor they executed a covert operation to persuade Hitler to declare war on the United States, which, of course, he did before America entered the war against Germany.

There is no topic of present interest, involving as it does the status of men, women and children of various countries, and even of birth in the same country, as that of nationality. It bristles with difficulties! To begin with, various terms are used, apparently meant to mean one and the same thing, although unless they are carefully defined, they may refer to different aspects of the subject. For example, “ national” is used as a synonym for “ subject” or “ citizen,” yet one may be a national of a country, and subject to its jurisdiction, without, however, being a citizen—as in the case of the Filipinos, who are, indeed, subject to the Government of the United States and entitled to its protection abroad, although they are not citizens either in the sense of international, or of national law. Then there is a difference of opinion as to the branch of law to which the matter belongs—the Englishspeaking peoples regarding it as forming part of the public law of nations, whereas others consider it as more properly falling within the domain of private international law, to which, in turn, the English world gives the not inappropriate designation of conflict of laws.

A Conference of plenipotentiaries, convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), met in Rio de Janeiro from May 2 to 14,1966, to consider the rational utilization of tuna resources in the Atlantic Ocean. The Conference had before it a draft convention which had been drawn up by an FAO Working Party of government representatives, and adopted and opened for signature an International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas which provides for the establishment of a new fishery commission. As the subject of intergovernmental fishery bodies is one which has been somewhat neglected by international lawyers, the purpose of this article is to examine the constitutional and legal characteristics of the proposed Commission in the context of the numerous other intergovernmental fishery bodies already in operation.

The State Immunity Act 1978 (the Act) came into force in the United Kingdom on November 22, 1978. Preceded by much-noted and bold decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and of the Court of Appeal, the Act puts an end to the old British doctrine of absolute immunity and endorses the restrictive doctrine.

The 1966 Draft Articles on the Law of Treaties, drafted over a period of five years of intensive work by an official organ of the international community—the International Law Commission of the United Nations—is more comprehensive and more reflective of community consensus than any previous draft prepared by international lawyers on the law of treaties. In contrast with the excellent Draft Convention on the Law of Treaties completed by the Harvard Eesearch in International Law in 1935, preparation of the Commission’s draft had the advantage of participation by members representative of all continents and of the views of states which were not in existence in 1935.

The International Law Commission held its sixty-seventh session in Geneva from May 4 to June 5, and from July 6 to August 7, 2015, under the chairmanship of Narinder Singh (India). Notably, the Commission’s drafting committee completed a full set of sixteen draft conclusions on the topic of identification of customary international law, paving the way for those conclusions with commentaries to be approved by the Commission on first reading in 2016.

Recently, certain small uninhabited islands in the central Pacific Ocean have assumedsudden importance for the British Empire and the United States. Their value as landing places for commercial aviation and as strategic bases for air and naval forces is being increasingly recognized. Acquired during the past century by Great Britain and the UnitedStates, many of these islands have been the object of conflicting claims to sovereignty by the two nations. To clarify their status, it has been found desirable to review the past practice of these states and to examine those factors which were considered adequateto create sovereign rights over uninhabited islands in the Pacific.

Four different definitions of international law can be found in the literature. According to the narrowest of these definitions, international law is that legal order which regulates the relations between independent (sovereign) states. Thus the Permanent Court of International Justice stated in its judgment of September 7, 1927, in the Lotus case: “International Law governs relations between independent States.” But generally this definition is immediately expanded by defining international law as that legal order which governs relations between independent states and certain other sovereign communities (the Catholic Church, recognized belligerents). Brandweiner uses an even wider definition. He considers that international law includes also the legal rules governing the relations between states and other ecclesiastical communities as well as the relations of the different Churches inter se.

Several elements have interacted to influence the course and pattern of the boundaries and the regime of Soviet territorial waters. The foremost of these is national security. All of the seas bordering the U.S.S.R. have narrow entrances which can be commanded easily by hostile foreign Powers. During the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, German vessels and, after the War, Allied vessels in the Baltic and the Dardanelles restricted to an uncomfortable extent the freedom of action of the Soviet Government. Soviet weakness in the Baltic theater was a major factor in determining Soviet policy towards Finland and the Baltic states during the 1939-1941 period, and the proximity of NATO naval forces to the Baltic continues to provoke Soviet proposals to close the sea to noncoastal Powers. Similarly, the U.S.S.R. was compelled to endure Turkish violations of the Montreux Convention on the Turkish Straits during World War II while its Black Sea fleet was immobilized. The Pacific coast seas and the Atlantic and Pacific approaches to the Arctic seas are also susceptible to a blockade by hostile Powers. Even the Arctic seas themselves, once regarded as an unguarded but impregnable frozen boundary, have become unexpectedly vulnerable with the development of nuclear submarines.

On January 2, 1988, President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada signed the landmark comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries that already enjoyed the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world. The FTA was subsequently ratified by the legislatures of both countries, if only after a bitterly fought election on the subject in Canada. On January 1, 1989, the FTA formally came into effect.