In September 1984, the UN Secretary-General (Respondent) offered five-year fixed-term contracts as interpreters to Rong Qiu, Kefu Zhou, and Jiping Yao (Applicants), who had just completed the UN training course for interpreters at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages. The letters of appointment accepted by the Applicants stated that they were “on secondment from the Government of China.” They received very good performance ratings, and in the spring of 1989 their department recommended that they be offered probationary, career-track appointments when their contracts expired.

This case is the latest in a series of actions brought in the United States since 1984 that have resulted in court and administrative decisions on the claim of asylum by, and attempt at extradition of, the plaintiff, Joseph Patrick Doherty, a native of Northern Ireland and subject of the United Kingdom and its Colonies. He was admittedly a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and was convicted in absentia, in Northern Ireland, of murder of a British Army officer there in 1980. In the instant case, the plaintiff sought review by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit of two administrative decisions by successive Attorneys General of the United States (one by Edwin Meese in June 1988, and the other by Richard Thornburgh in July 1989).

While in the United States, Scott Nelson saw a printed advertisement recruiting employees for the King Faisal Specialist Hospital (Hospital) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The recruitment was conducted by an independent corporation, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), which had contracted with Saudi Arabia to recruit employees for the Hospital. Nelson submitted an application, was interviewed by Hospital officials in Saudi Arabia, returned to the United States, and signed an employment agreement in Miami, Florida. As a monitoring systems engineer, he was responsible for electronic monitoring and control systems capabilities and the modification of existing equipment and installation of new equipment.

In a consolidated constitutional proceeding, fourteen claimants, all citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), attacked the constitutionality of that clause of the German Unification Agreement providing that property expropriated during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany during the period 1945-1949 was not to be returned to the original owners and that the owners could only be compensated in money. The Court confirmed the constitutionality of the provision and thus took a first step toward clarifying one of the greatest obstacles to significant investment in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR): unclear property ownership, making it impossible to say with certainty who ultimately owned much of the property in the former GDR.

Plaintiffs, two Panamanian corporations and a Swiss bank, brought an action against the Republic of Argentina and Banco Central de la República Argentina (Banco Central) for breach of obligations arising out of the issuance of certain bonds. The defendants moved to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and lack of personal jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (28 U.S.C. §§1602-1611 (1988)) (FSIA). In the alternative, defendants moved for dismissal under the doctrine of forum non conveniens. The district court denied the motions and held that: (1) the acts of the defendants in issuing, and breaching the payment obligations under, certain bonds were commercial, and the failure to pay on those bonds, which contemplated payment in New York, constituted a direct effect in the United States even though the plaintiffs were non-U.S. entities; (2) the aggregate of the defendants’ contacts with the United States, together with the promise to pay the plaintiffs in New York, satisfied the minimum contacts requirement under the due process clause; and (3) the defendants had not made a sufficient showing to justify a dismissal of the case on the grounds of forum non conveniens.

Maria Kowalska, a former administrative officer of the City of Hamburg, requested payment of an extra allowance on the occasion of her retirement. The Collective Agreement for Federal Employees (Agreement) prescribed such allowanees for full-time employees only. Ms. Kowalska was a part-time employee and was therefore not entitled to the extra allowance according to the Agreement. The questions the Labor Court Hamburg referred to the Court of Justice of the European Communities were: (1) whether a collective bargaining agreement provision excluding part-time employees from certain allowances violates Article 119 of the Treaty Establishing the European Communities (equal pay for men and women), part-time employees being mostly female; and (2) if there is discrimination incompatible with EEC law, do part-time employees have a right to extra allowances proportionate to their working hours on the basis of Articles 119 and 117 (improvement and harmonization of workers’ conditions) and Council Directive 75/117 on equal pay for men and women, notwithstanding the provision to the contrary in the Agreement, or do freedom and autonomy in collective bargaining preclude such a right?

In 1978 a French company (Pipeline) and the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) entered into a contract (governed by Iranian law) for the supply and erection of gas pipeline installations linking certain Iranian cities. Apparently not paid for its services, Pipeline brought an action in France against NIGC. NIGC’s plea of immunity was denied by the Court of Appeal of Versailles, whose decision was reversed by the Court of Cassation.

Max Witzemann had been sentenced to a prison term for counterfeiting in 1982. According to that nonappealable decision, he had imported counterfeit U.S. dollar notes into Germany in 1981. On the basis of the decision, the Hauptzollamt sought to collect customs duties and turnover taxes on the import of the forged notes. Witzemann refused to pay, pleading that the collection of customs duties and import turnover taxes violated Articles 9 and 12-29 of the EEC Treaty, which concern the customs union.

The judgment of the Supreme Court of Colombia, rendered upon the petition by a citizen to declare Law 20 of 1974, approving the concordat between the Holy See and Colombia, to be unconstitutional, deals with one of the most controversial aspects of the interface between international law and constitutional law under many modern constitutions. In most contemporary constitutional systems, the conclusion of international agreements requires parliamentary participation. In the United States only one house—the Senate—must give its advice and consent, but in the majority of states with bicameral systems, including Colombia, the approval must be given by both houses, usually in the form of a statute, the so-called ratification law. According to Article 120, subsection 20, of the Constitution of Colombia,

In October 1988 the American Branch of the International Law Association and the American Society of International Law established a Joint Committee on the Role of the Legal Adviser of the Department of State. The Committee’s charge was to examine the role of the Legal Adviser in encouraging respect for international law in the U.S. government decisionmaking process, and to make suggestions and recommendations to enhance the Legal Adviser’s effectiveness in this regard. The thirty-four members of the Committee included nine former Legal Advisers, a former President’s counsel, other past and present U.S. government officials, academics and private attorneys. Collectively, the Committee reflected broad experience and a variety of perspectives as regards issues of U.S. foreign policy and international law. (The members of the Committee are listed in footnote 1.)

In the Notes and Comments section of the January 1991 issue of the Journal, Professor Richard Lillich presented a thorough and timely analysis of the Soering decision of the European Court of Human Rights, a significant addition to international human rights law. His evaluation of the Soering judgment and his reflections on several of its wider ramifications are especially relevant to the United States military, for the decision constitutes a serious threat to the administration of U.S. military justice overseas and to the treaty relationships between the United States and its NATO allies. A recent European case, Short v. Kingdom of the Netherlands, demonstrates that this threat is far from hypothetical.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.

The forty-third session of the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) was held in Geneva from April 29 to July 19, 1991, and was chaired by Ambassador Abdul Koroma of Sierra Leone. During the session, the last of the ILC’s current five-year term of office, the Commission adopted full sets of draft articles on three of the subjects on its agenda. It completed the second reading, or final adoption, of the draft on jurisdictional immunities of states and their property, and approved on first reading its articles on the law of the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, and the Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. In its report to the General Assembly, the Commission recommended that the Assembly convene a diplomatic conference charged with concluding a convention on the basis of the draft articles on jurisdictional immunities. The drafts on watercourses and crimes were sent to governments for their comments, which the Commission requested they submit by January 1, 1993. The ILC will then give each of those drafts a second reading, taking into account the observations received from states. In addition to the progress made on these topics, the Commission considered reports on the three remaining subjects on its agenda: international liability for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law, relations between states and international organizations (second part of the topic) and state responsibility.

On October 29 and 30, 1990, a meeting was held of the heads of the offices responsible for international legal services of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the member states of the United Nations—the Legal Advisers. The meeting was organized at the invitation of the Legal Advisers of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Canada, India, Mexico, Poland and Sweden, and with the assistance of the Legal Counsel of the United Nations, Under-Secretary-General Carl-August Fleischhauer. Some twenty-five Legal Advisers and thirty-two of their deputies or other representatives attended, including all five colleagues representing the permanent members of the Security Council.