The fourth informal meeting of the heads of offices responsible for international legal services of the foreign ministries of the member states of the United Nations (the Legal Advisers) took place at UN headquarters in New York on October 25 and 26, 1993. The meeting, like the previous three, was organized at the invitation of the Legal Advisers 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. Forty-eight Legal Advisers and thirteen of their deputies attended, together with nearly fifty other interested participants, including the chairman of the Sixth Committee, María del Lujan Flores, the chairman of the International Law Commission, Julio Barboza, the Secretary-General of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee, Frank X. Njenga, a representative from Switzerland and a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Representatives of all five permanent members of the Security Council were present.

The International Law Commission of the United Nations held its forty-fifth session from May 2 to July 23, 1993, under the chairmanship of Ambassador Julio Barboza of Argentina. The Commission elaborated a substantially complete draft statute of an international criminal court in a working group, considered aspects of state responsibility, commenced drafting articles on liability for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law, began its second reading on non-navigational uses of international watercourses, and made recommendations for its future work. The Commission continued its innovative use of working groups and subgroups to expedite its work and, consequently, had a highly productive session.

A congressional inquiry to the Department of State concerned the practice of signing documents such as the Trilateral Statement concluded at Moscow on January 14, 1994, by President William J. Clinton, Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, and Ukraine President Leonid M. Kravchuk and the status of such documents under both United States and international law and practice.

At its forty-fifth session in 1993, the International Law Commission took note of the report of a working group containing a Draft Statute for an International Criminal Tribunal, and transmitted that report to the General Assembly for comment. This is the second stage in a process that began in 1992, when the Commission established a Working Group on an International Criminal Court, which laid down the basic parameters for a draft statute. Its general approach was endorsed by the Commission and subsequently by the General Assembly. The Draft Statute adopted by the working group in 1993 gives effect to that approach, although with a number of refinements and much added detail. The third stage of the process is intended to occur in 1994, when the Commission hopes to adopt a final version of the Draft Statute, taking into account comments made on it at the General Assembly and elsewhere. The purpose of this Note is to outline the provisions of the Draft Statute, in the hope of furthering understanding and discussion of its provisions.

The June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights witnessed the extraordinary success of efforts by women’s rights activists worldwide to end the historic disregard of human rights violations against women. Indeed, women’s human rights was perhaps the only area in which the World Conference can be said to have met the challenge of defining a forward-looking agenda twenty-five years after the last world conference on human rights. The conference significantly expanded the international human rights agenda to include gender-specific violations. The final conference document, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, identifies particular examples of gender-specific abuses as human rights violations and calls for integration of women’s human rights throughout United Nations activities. Most strikingly, the conference crystallized a political consensus that various forms of violence against women should be examined within the context of human rights standards and in conjunction with gender discrimination. This Note reviews the treatment of women’s human rights in the Declaration and Programme of Action and related developments in the preparatory process for the World Conference.

Throughout modern history, there have only been three internationally established commissions to investigate war crimes and prepare for eventual prosecutions before international and national judicial bodies: the 1919 Commission on the Responsibilities of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties for Violations of the Laws and Customs of War (1919 Commission), the 1943 United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), and the Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992) to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia (Commission of Experts). Even though there are no connections among the three bodies, there is enough historical precedential value in the first two as the antecedents of the Commission of Experts to warrant a brief examination.

In 1982 the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea adopted a treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, that succeeded in resolving the most fundamental questions of the law of the sea in accordance with three basic principles:

1. 1. The rules of the law of the sea must fairly balance the respective interests of all states, notably the competing coastal and maritime interests, in a manner that is generally acceptable.

2. 2. Multilateral negotiations on the basis of consensus replace unilateral claims of right as the principal means for determining that balance.

3. 3. Compulsory dispute settlement mechanisms should be adopted to interpret, apply, and enforce the balance.

The fiftieth session of the UN Human Rights Commission took place in Geneva between January 31 and March 11, 1994, under the chairmanship of Peter P. van Wulfften Palthe of the Netherlands. During its annual six weeks of rhetoric and resolutions, the Commission adopted 109 resolutions and decisions, most by consensus. It adopted resolutions or took other actions addressing human rights violations in thirty countries.