For the first time the International Court of Justice has squarely faced and ruled upon the right of a third state to intervene in a case to which two other states are parties. The litigation was the Case Concerning the Continental Shelf (Tunisia/Libyan Arab Jamahiriya), Application of Malta for Permission to Intervene, Judgment of April 14, 1981. The Court unanimously denied permission to intervene, but three judges appended separate opinions which contain matters of considerable interest.

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.

At a hearing on the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (the Moon Treaty), adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 5, 1979, which the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held on July 29, 1980, S. Neil Hosenball, General Counsel of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. representative on the UN Outer Space Legal Subcommittee, stated that interpretation of the Agreement depended upon its negotiating history as required by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) and by customary international law.

By a note handed to the Secretary of the People’s Committee (the ranking official) of the Libyan “People’s Bureau” at Washington, on December 22, 1980, the Department of State signified acceptance by the United States Government of an offer of compensation from the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for damages and expenditures that resulted from a mob attack (“students’ spontaneous demonstration”) on the American Embassy at Tripoli on December 2, 1979. Without acknowledging responsibility for the attack, the Libyan Government had agreed to pay compensation in a note received in the Department on December 6, 1979. Following the attack, the United States had reduced its mission at Tripoli to two officers, whom it withdrew on May 2, 1980, when the American Embassy at Tripoli was closed.

In a note of June 10, 1980, the Turkish Embassy requested assistance from the Department of State in connection with a child custody proceeding in a Virginia State court. The court had reportedly ruled that, because there was martial law in certain Turkish provinces, Turkey was not a safe place of residence for the children. The Embassy suggested that it was not for the court to “pass judgment about conditions in Turkey about which authoritative information is not in its possession”; rather, it was “the responsibility of the executive to make a policy decision about the visit and residence of U.S. citizens in foreign countries and [to] inform the judicial and legislative bodies.”