The Arctic was one of the main theatres for strategic military confrontation during the Cold War between the blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. There was no place for multilateral cooperation, other than for very limited issue areas, such as the 1973 Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears between the five states with polar bear populations. Yet, the warming of relations by the end of the Cold War changed all this. Inspired by Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech in 1987, in which the Soviet leader pro-posed various possible areas for Arctic cooperation, differing ideas for international cooperation were advanced. Canadians, in particular, were trying to advance international treaty-based general cooperation for the Arctic, but this never came to pass and it was eventually Finland who was able to broker soft-law collaboration between the Cold War rivals.

Arbitration in the Nineteenth Century. While arbitration was employed for the settlement of international disputes throughout the nineteenth century, it was employed more frequently in the later than in the earlier part of the century. In most cases, resort to arbitration depended upon an ad hoc agreement between the states concerned; the tribunal to which a dispute was referred was created ad hoc, and it ceased to function when the particular dispute was disposed of. It was hardly before the middle of the century that states began to agree in advance to have resort to arbitration, and these agreements were usually very restricted. General bipartite arbitration treaties were all but unknown prior to 1850; and even when they became more numerous their provisions were seldom all-embracing. Increasingly, however, states began to agree in advance to arbitrate special questions. In a few cases, provisions for the arbitration of certain disputes were included in multipartite instruments: the Universal Postal Convention of October 9, 1874 (Article 16), the General Act of Brussels of July 2, 1890 (Article 55), and the Convention on Railway Freight Transportation of October 14, 1890 (Article 57), are outstanding examples.

In November 2005, the U.S. media reported that the Central Intelligence Agency was operating secret detention facilities in a handful of foreign countries, including two in eastern Europe, and that detainees were often transferred between those facilities and states known to engage in torture. The news that terrorism suspects may have been denied their human rights in member states of the Council of Europe caused concern within the Council and triggered several responses. Within days of the media reports, the Council's Parliamentary Assembly appointed a rapporteur to investigate the extent to which member states were participating in the CIA program. The rapporteur, in turn, asked the Venice Commission to prepare a legal opinion on the member states’ related international obligations. On the basis of that opinion, and the rapporteur's finding that a fair number of member states had acquiesced or participated in the CIA program, the Parliamentary Assembly adopted a resolution and a recommendation intended to safeguard against such conduct in the future. Separately, the secretary general of the Council invoked his authority under Article 52 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to survey member states on relevant aspects of their domestic legal systems, including whether those systems contain controls on foreign state conduct deemed to infringe ECHR rights.

This article argues that a form of legal regulation is embodied in decisions at the UN Security Council that condone but do not formally authorize specific military operations. Such decisions sometimes inflect or go beyond what the jus ad bellum permits through its general standards—that is, under the prohibition of cross-border force and small handful of exceptions. Recognizing that this form of regulation is both part of the law and different in kind from regulation through the general standards should change how we think about the jus ad bellum.

“Chicken War” is a quip for a long-festering controversy that in the summer of 1963 bristled with menace of a possible trade war between the United States and the European Economic Community. Actually, no outbreak of hostilities eventuated; for, in good time, basis for a détente was found. This entailed resort to a dispute-resolution machinery, made possible because of the existence of an organized international forum in which countries have gained experience in the tasks of harmonizing trade interests. How the controversy started, burgeoned and was disposed of illustrates the complications arising from the creation of the Common Market and the ways devised for coping with these and other complications afflicting international trade.

In the October 1989 issue of this Journal, I wrote a brief essay concerning the U.S. Constitution and law enforcement abroad. I called attention to the case of Fawaz Yunis, a Lebanese national who was arrested on the high seas by U.S. officers and brought to the United States for trial on charges of aircraft hijacking and hostage taking. Within the space constraints of the Journal’s issue commemorating two centuries of the Constitution, I was able to discuss only one of the questions illustrated by the Yunis case—the question of jurisdiction over crimes committed by aliens abroad. My conclusion, in brief, was that a general reliance on passive personality as the basis for jurisdiction—i.e., the U.S. nationality of victims of the offense—was of doubtful validity under the Constitution, but that jurisdiction based on legislation enacted in implementation of international conventions widely adhered to probably was constitutional. The Yunis case raises two other issues that I believe are of continuing interest: (1) to what extent do the constitutional and statutory restraints on U.S. law enforcement officers apply abroad? and (2) does the so-called Ker-Frisbie rule, according to which a court in the United States may try a person brought before it for a crime over which it has jurisdiction—regardless of how the accused came to be before the court—remain valid and persuasive in the last decade of the 20th century? I want to explore these questions here, bearing in mind that the two questions are related to each other, as well as to the question of jurisdiction to prescribe discussed in the earlier article. Before embarking on the analysis, I want to set forth again in somewhat greater length the saga of Fawaz Yunis, as well as that of two other persons recently seized abroad by authority of the United States for trial in the United States.

In his great blueprint, “An International Bill of the Rights of Man,” written in 1943, i.e. before the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations of 1944 and the San Francisco Conference of 1945, Professor Hersch Lauterpaeht (as he then was) suggested that the international machinery for securing the observance of the “International Bill of the Rights of Man,” which he then proposed, must be of two kinds—of supervision in its widest sense, and of enforcement. By “supervision in its widest sense” he meant “all activity calculated to ensure the observance of the Bill of Rights short of actual enforcement by political or physical means of compulsion.” He went on to say that this included

As a result of the conflict that broke out on April 2, 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, the United States (and some other countries) applied a number of coercive economic measures against Argentina, which had serious political and economic effects, as well as an impact on the outcome of the conflict.

Modern science and technology have produced and will continue to produce new phenomena calling for new rules of law. Among these phenomena are the so-called “pirate” broadcasting stations, moored or installed outside territorial waters so as to escape the control of states. This new phenomenon has made its appearance in particular in Northwest Europe. It is natural, then, that states whose interests are actually or potentially adversely affected by such stations should contemplate what measures of protection are possible in fact and permissible in law.

In 1989 the United Nations General Assembly voted to convene a Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, with the highest possible level of participation. One of the major items on the agenda—many maintain, the highest priority—is a treaty to cope with climate change. Toward that end, the Assembly established the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which was to try to finish drafting an effective framework convention on climate change in time to be signed at the conference.

While the world is experiencing its industrial revolution, demand for the efficient exploitation of global natural resources is making states increasingly interdependent.

A few years ago expert opinion seemed to be veering sharply toward the conclusion that the multinational enterprise had put national sovereignties “at bay.” As astute an observer as Raymond Vernon was writing that “sovereign states are feeling naked,” that concepts such as national sovereignty and economic strength appeared to be “drained of meaning,” that the consequent sense of “nakedness and dependence” had focussed interest on the “institutions which are thought to be the main agents of the change,” and that prominentamong these was the “multinational enterprise.”

The Mosul dispute involved the disposition of some 35,000 square miles of territory with a population of about 800,000. Iraq’s claim to the territory had been substantially supported by the unratified Treaty of Sèvres, but no agreement being reached at Lausanne in 1923, the treaty there negotiated and later ratified provided for maintenance of the military status quo and submission to the League of Nations Council, if nine months further negotiation proved fruitless.

Where a state and an alien agree in a contract to arbitrate disputes relating to the contract, in terms which indicate that arbitration is to be the exclusive remedy, need the alien exhaust any other remedy before an international claim may be presented relating to a dispute which falls within the scope of the arbitration clause ?