Dr. Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante y Sirvén, a giant in the field of international law, passed away at his home in Havana, Cuba, on August 24, 1951, at the age of 86. As a writer, teacher, judge and advocate in matters relating to public and private international law he had attained world prominence.

For two and a half years, Colombia and Peru have engaged in a controversy regarding the status as a political offender and the ultimate disposition of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, long-time chief of the leftist Alianza Popular Revolucianaria Americana (APBA), who was granted asylum in the Colombian Embassy at Lima on January 3, 1949. Several months of fruitless diplomatic negotiation between the parties were followed by their submission of the case to the International Court of Justice which, in turn, has dealt with various aspects of the matter in the course of three successive judgments.

The postwar cultural isolationism towards the West and a specifically Soviet complex of inferiority inherited from the early years of the regime have produced since the last war an attitude of self-assertion. This somehow childish attitude is expressed, among others, by a frenzy of claims to Russian priorities not only in regard to technological inventions, but also in respect to the learned theories. The Soviet scholars seem to forget that the priority of a thinker in stating a concept, though important in itself, does not reduce another ’ s merit of fully developing a new concept in all its intellectual aspects; moreover, the importance of an intellectual must also be measured by the actual influence he exerted upon his contemporaries and the succeeding generations. A Russian writer may have preceded Bodin in formulating the idea of the state supreme power, but this does not alter the fact that Bodin was the first to establish a fully developed theory of sovereignty, nor does it diminish the Frenchman’s influence upon many generations. However, this Soviet frenzy of claiming priorities may have one beneficial result, namely, it might enrich our knowledge of the older Russian thought. The West is fairly familiar with some Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but knows next to nothing concerning their predecessors. This is why one may read with interest V. I. Zuev’s article:“The Priority of Russian Juristic Thought in the Establishment and Development of the Theory of Sovereignty” (Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, No. 3, March, 1951, pp. 24-37). This article presents another interest as well: It illustrates the Soviet opposition to the contemporary Western tendency to get rid of the encumbering dogma of state sovereignty; the concept of state sovereignty provides a theoretical basis for Soviet foreign policy, especially within the United Nations, and supplies the necessary arguments for denying the superiority of international law over municipal law:

Efforts are being made in the United Nations toward a greater integration in one field of international legislation which are different from those undertaken on earlier occasions (such as in the case of the Buenos Aires Treaty of 1936 to Co-ordinate Existing Treaties, or even of the Pact of Bogotá of 1948 and the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others), and which do not seem to have attracted much attention. They are therefore briefly described hereafter.

The remarkable achievement of the Conference on Protection of Victims of War, which sat at Geneva from April 21 to August 12,1949, stands out as a landmark in the history of international legislation. It was possible only because of a long and patient course of preparation, chiefly due to the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This writer wants to bring to the notice of his colleagues in the world that the first Hispano-Luso-American Congress of International Law will be held during October of this year in Madrid. The initiative has been taken by a group of Spanish professors and institutions of international law. The preparatory commission is presided over by the well-known international lawyer of the University of Madrid, Yanguas Messia; Dr. Luis Garcia Arias is its Secretary.