On June 7, 1960, it was announced that the government of Guatemala had entered into a one-year stand-by arrangement with the International Monetary Fund authorizing drawings up to $15 million in support of the country's currency. The purpose of the arrangement was to help Guatemala maintain the traditional stability of the quetzal by providing a second line of reserves to supplement other stabilization measures, such as an increase of reserve requirements against bank deposits, limitations on central bank rediscounts, and a further reduction of government expenditures. Guatemala, with a quota of $15 million, had not previously drawn upon the Fund's resources.

The European Parliament met in Strasbourg on February 5–6, 1963. The session opened with a statement by Mr. Robert Marjolin, French vice-president of the European Economic Community (EEC) Commission, on the economic situation of the Community. Provided that there was no slump in any important country outside the Six, Mr. Marjolin said that satisfactory economic growth was to be expected within the Community during 1963. He forecast that the rising costs of consumer goods would slacken then level off in the present year.

The third part of the eleventh ordinary session of the Consultative Assembly was opened on January 18, 1960, with a tribute to its President, Mr. John Edward, who had died at Strasbourg on November 23, 1959. At the onset, the Assembly unanimously adopted a motion against anti Semitic outbreaks presented by the Political Committee, which a delegation from the Israeli parliament gratefully acknowledged. A motion to adjourn the election of the President until the opening of the next session was also adopted. Following presentation of a report on the activities of the Bureau and Standing Committee, the second supplementary report to the tenth report of the Committee of Ministers was presented by its chairman, Mr. Pierre Wigny, Belgian Foreign Minister. He noted that the Assembly had been disturbed over the fact that the Council of Europe was no longer fulfilling an adequate role, and stressed the importance of the exchanges of views which the Committee of Ministers had decided could take place at the request of any member state. In the economic sphere he called attention to recent moves toward economic coordination, and, before concluding, asked the Assembly to examine further both the question of Eurafrican relations and that of rationalization of European institutions.

Reorganization of the Coal and Steel Industries of the Ruhr: On March 29 the Allied High Commissioners met with west German trade union leaders to discuss the contemplated revision of the anti-trust provisions for Ruhr iron and steel and coal industries of United States-United Kingdom Law 75, passed by the bipartite military government organization in November 1947. After two days of continued negotiations on the proposed law, which would reorganize the iron and steel industries of the Ruhr, the Allied High Commission on April 14 issued a communiqué stating that the draft of the law had been adopted with certain amendments. The communiqué further stated that the decision to adopt the preamble had not been unanimous and that an appeal had been made against it. When Sir Brian Robertson (United Kingdom) and John J. McCloy (United States) voted in favor of the preamble, André François-Poncet (France) appealed to the French government against a clause granting the federal government the right to decide the eventual ownership of die iron and steel and coal industries. Following rejection of the French appeal the Commission made public the reorganization law on May 17.

The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereinafter referred to as the Convention), signed in Rome on November 4, 1950 entered into force on September 3, 1953. It provides in Article 19 for the establishment of two organs whose task it is “to ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken” in the Convention by the contracting parties: a European Commission of Human Rights (hereinafter referred to as the Commission) and a European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter referred to as the Court).

A visitor from another, more advanced, planet would find many extraordinary paradoxes on earth, but surely the most extraordinary would be the fantastic destructive potential of nuclear weapons which contrasts starkly with the primitive and near-impotent institutions of global peacekeeping. He might marvel that a breed capable of producing the wealth for a $185 billion armory of lethal devices, let alone the technology for killing several hundred million humans in a single exchange of nuclear weapons, had not also produced a workable international order capable of regulating such apocalyptic man-made power.

The International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) was notified in Demember 1962 that, due to the Chinese invasion and the consequent national emergency, India could not host the fifteenth Universal Postal Congress which had been scheduled to open on March 1, 1963, in New Delhi. On January 17, 1963, the Director of the International Bureau, Mr. Weber, received from the Austrian government an official invitation to hold the fifteenth Congress in Vienna in June 1964.

It is a truism that the text of the Charter gives a quite misleading picture of the United Nations as it is today. In no respect is this more true than in the working of the Organization in the maintenance of international peace and security. Those provisions of the Charter which were claimed by its authors to provide the new Organization with teeth that the League of Nations did not have either have never been used or have in practice been of little importance. New emphases and new methods have been developed through the liberal interpretation of Charter provisions. These have not always been equally acceptable to all Members, however. The process of adaptation and development continues, with great present uncertainty as to what the future has in store.

On May 5, 1951, the Deputies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced the adoption by their governments of new terms of reference for the North Atlantic Council, a reorganization of the various committees of the Council, and the creation of a financial and economic board.

In addition to the Charter of the Organization of American States, the American Treaty of Pacific Settlement (the Pact of Bogotá), the Economic Agreement of Bogotá, the Inter-American Convention on the Granting of Civil Rights to Women, and the Inter-American Convention on the Granting of Political Rights to Women, the conference approved several resolutions and recommendations. Among these were included a resolution which established the Inter-American Juridical Committee as the Permanent Committee of the Inter-American Council of Jurists; one which provided for a survey of inter-American specialized organizations in order to determine which ones should be discontinued and which ones maintained; an agreement to convoke an Economic Conference of the Organization of American States in Buenos Aires in late 1948 or early 1949; and a resolution calling for a meeting of representatives of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America to draft a formula for the functioning of the two organizations Mid to outline their respective fields of activity. Recommendations were made concerning working conditions, improvement of social services, and the achievement of social justice in the American republics; an Inter-American Charter of Social Guarantees to protect workers was adopted by the conference, as well as the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The conference also approved the statute of the Inter-American Commission of Women; Two further resolutions were passed, one condemning international communism, or any other totalitarian doctrine, and a second creating an American Committee on Dependent Territories.

“The United Nations was a kind of bridge between past and present conflicts and a happy future. The hopes of the world rested on its successful operations. A tremendous responsibility lay on the Members of the United Nations because if no such bridge existed, it would be difficult to imagine what the state of the world wouldbe like”, said Prime Minister Nehru, recently neatly summing up the Indian attitude towards the United Nations.

The Board of Governors presented its report on the Agency's work during its seventh year, covering the period from July 1, 1963, to June 30, 1964, to the eighth General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Noting that the membership of the Agency had increased from 82 to 87 during the year under review, the report listed the five new members: Algeria, Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Libya, and Nigeria. In its introduction, the report stated that the year had been marked by further notable improvement in the prospects for economically competitive nuclear power and by interesting developments with regard to the use of nuclear energy for desalinization. In accordance with a request of the General Conference, the Board had considered the question of financing IAEA's activities but had not been able to make any further recommendations.

The South West Africa Cases presented the International Court of Justice (ICJ) with a choice not only between the parties to the suit but also between rival claims about the nature of international law itself. Perhaps every case presents the Court with a choice of some degree between jurisprudential foundations, but in the South West Africa Cases the choice is striking.

According to the press, a one-day meeting of the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow on February 4, 1960, was attended by premiers and foreign ministers of the eight pact members (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania) and by observers from Communist China, Mongolia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. In a 4,000-word declaration issued after the meeting, the pact members expressed the hope that forthcoming East-West summit talks would be “a turning point in the relations” between the two groups of countries and proposed that the summit agenda include such topics as general and controlled disarmament, a German peace treaty, creation of a free city of West Berlin, a ban on nuclear weapons tests, and amelioration of relations between East and West. The committee also repeated the communist proposal for a non-aggression pact between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact countries and called on NATO members to respond to the Soviet Union's armed forces cut of 1, 200, 000 men by reducing their forces as well. It criticized NATO for maintaining “inflated armies” and for arming West Germany with atomic weapons, adding that the West German government was being given a free hand in the production of these weapons.

The Ministerial Council of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) met in Lisbon on May 9–11, 1963, under the chairmanship of Mr. Corrêa d'Oliveira (Portuguese Minister of State). The Ministers decided to establish a final timetable for the dismantling of tariffs on industrial products. These tariffs would be eliminated by December 31, 1966. The next 10 percent reduction would take place on December 31, 1963, thus bringing intra-EFTA tariffs down to 40 percent of their level when EFTA began.

The United Nations action against aggression in Korea was aided by a series of fortuitous circumstances which included the absence of the Soviet delegate from the Security Council in June 1950, the existence of a United Nations commission in Korea which was able to provide a timely and unimpeachable report of the facts, and the availability to United Nations forces of a base in Japan from which military operations could be, conveniently undertaken. For the purpose of assuring so far as possible that united resistance to further acts of aggression would not have to depend so largely on coincidence, the General Assembly, on November 3, 1950, gave its overwhelming approval to the “Uniting for Peace” resolution.