The sixth session of the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO) Council—the sixteen-member governing body of the Organization—met on February 20–22, 1962, in London and considered various matters relating to the work program of the Organization, including arrangements for the forthcoming Oil Pollution Conference. In addition, the Council decided to set up a working group of experts to advise on ways and means of tackling the problem of facilitation of travel and transport in the maritime field.

Official international organizations are mechanisms which states join because they believe that membership will enable them more effectively to achieve the broad goals of their respective foreign policies. While there is no question that there has been a considerable element of idealism in its creation, the countries which have joined the United Nations have done so because they believe – or hope – that one or another of the instrumentalities provided by United Nations machinery can be used to their advantage. They may wish to improve their standard of living, to provide some increased measure of security either through implementation of the idea of world organization or through other specific policies, or to promote, perhaps, an expansion of their influence. With fifty–nine different Members, it would hardly be surprising to find fifty–nine differing points of view, and it should not be surprising to find these countries playing practical politics to get out of the United Nations precisely what they joined it to achieve, or, since there may be differences, what they desire to achieve after they have once been admitted. Each Member is, in short, using – or trying to use – United Nations machinery to further its own foreign policy.

The 37 contracting parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) were represented at the meeting of the GATT inter-sessional committee, held in Geneva for three weeks, beginning April 14, 1958. The committee discussed at length the provisions of the Rome treaty establishing the European Economic Community. In its consideration of the question, the committee dealt with the common customs tariff which the community was to bring in, the use of import restrictions by the six signatories to protect their balance of payments situation, the so-called managed market for agriculture, and the association of the overseas territories of the community as part of the common market and the effect of this on world trade. Baron Snoy, who represented the European Economic Community, informed the committee that there would be a meeting in July at which representatives of the six countries would discuss preliminary matters affecting agriculture.

Legal controversy within the United Nations has resulted from the confrontation of the Organization's purposes with the specific rules set forth in the Charter for their implementation. Two sections of the Charter stand out as having produced yet unresolved legal tangles: One is the provision relating to the maintenance of international peace and security through effective collective action; the other is the group of provisions relating to self-determination and human rights. The Cold War and the attempts of the Great Powers to use the UN to attain or defend their policy objectives have shaped the attitude of Members toward the law and the role of law in the more clearly political activities of the UN. Consequently, politico-legal controversy has arisen with respect to the allocation of competences and powers between the General Assembly and the Security Council, the manner of operation of these two bodies, and the distribution of responsibility for “enforcement action’ between the UN and regional organizations.

So fast has been the development of trust territories toward self-government or independence that a situation will arise in 1960 that seems not to have been foreseen by the founding fathers of the United Nations. Togoland and the Cameroons under French administration and Somaliland under Italian administration will, according to present plans, cease to be trust territories during the course of 1960. Italy's automatic membership in the Trusteeship Council will thus cease, but France, as a permanent member of the Security Council, will remain a permanent member of the Trusteeship Council. This will have both short-term and long-term implications for the balance of membership in the Council, which according to the Charter should be divided equally between states which administer trust territories and states which do not administer such territories.

The increasing manifestations of Soviet interest in the United Nations Technical Assistance Program and in the establishment of a Soviet “Point Four” program for the under-developed, non-Communist countries of southeast Asia are of crucial importance to the west. In great measure the ultimate defense of western civilization lies in its ability to guide the surging flow of Asian nationalism into constructive, stable and satisfying channels of economic, social and political reforms. Soviet interest in under-developed areas is not new, but since the death of Stalin, a precipitant and ingenious reversal of tactics has occurred. Nowhere has this interest been more evident than in the Economic and Social Council and in its subsidiary bodies. Though the changed Soviet tactics in no way signify a modification of the long term objectives of Soviet strategy, they do demand a corresponding flexibility and imaginativeness on the part of western diplomacy. By understanding past Soviet behavior, acquiring an accurate knowledge of early postwar Soviet policy toward underdeveloped areas, and investigating the rationale behind that policy, the direction and intensity of present Soviet policy may be better analyzed and viewed in its proper perspective.

The sixth session of the Council of the Baghdad Pact, meeting on the ministerial level, was held in Karachi January 26–28, 1959. In its communique issued following the meeting the Council reaffirmed the value of the pact for defensive military cooperation as well as economic and technical cooperation in raising living standards. The statement said that the greater part of the meeting had been devoted to a frank exchange of views on the international situation. The Council agreed that more use should be made of regular meetings of the Council of Deputies at the headquarters of the pact for the sake of political solidarity. The offer of the United Kingdom government to equip a new nuclear center for training in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy was welcomed by the Council; it was decided that the center should be located in Teheran. As pointed out by one source, no reference was made in the communique either to the situation in Iraq or to Iraq's association with the pact.

Enforcement of international decisions and awards has not enjoyed universal recognition as a problem. Judgment-enforcement, it has been contended, is separable from the general question of sanctions; since submission to adjudication and arbitration in international law is voluntary, it is argued, a state will not submit a particular dispute to third-party settlement unless it has already reconciled itself to the possibility of losing the case. By logical reduction this argument must conclude that there have been no cases of noncompliance. Other writers assure compliance by pointing to the “moral force” of a decision. Given the decentralized structure of the international arena, the “horizontal” allocation of control, and the fact that international affairs hover so perilously close to crisis level, it is tempting to accept the nonexistence of an enforcement problem and thus to sidestep the necessity for formulating enforcement strategies. The wisdom of this course of action is questionable: “Leaving things well enough alone” may, arguably, not make them worse, but it will also not make them better. Organized international decision processes (which include adjudication and arbitration as well as a host of less institutionalized decision processes) counteract relative international anarchy. The efficacy of these decision processes depends upon compliance with or enforcement of their decisions.

The United States was the principal architect and builder of the United Nations, and the great mass of the American people welcomed the new edifice with enthusiasm and high—perhaps too high—hopes for a new world. Now, two decades and many crises later, United States opinion is wiser and more ambivalent. A large majority of the public still gives general support to the United Nations, but its enthusiasm is tempered by experience, and a vociferous minority holds views ranging from biting criticism to total rejection.

Case concerning the Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand): In an order of June 10, 1960, the International Court of Justice, having received the preliminary objections of the government of Thailand to its jurisdiction within the timelimit fixed for the filing of the countermemorial, set July 22, 1960, as the timelimit within which the government of Cambodia might present a written statement of its observations and submissionson the objections.

When M. Schuman first presented his celebrated Plan over two years ago, American views, official and public, were divided between an easy cynicism and a careless rapture. Optimism was stirred by the promise of a unity of European peoples, achieving strength, peace and prosperity through their mutual interests in producing coal and steel. Cynicism amused itself with a vision of a new bureaucracy, exercising new controls through the monster international cartel hidden beneath M. Schuman's diplomatic dress. All groups of opinion, materialistic and democratic in outlook, would have agreed that the Plan, however conceived and dedicated, could not long endure unless it touched the popular heart through raising the standard of living. Here, as elsewhere, Americans looked for Europe's salvation in the joy, excitement, strength and sense of human kinship that is supposed to come from successfully executed achievements in engineering.

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is one facet of the problem of preventing nuclear war, a problem which has engaged the statesmen of the world ever since the dust of the Nagasaki explosion settled. In the Truman-Attlee-King declaration of November 15, 1945, the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the Prime Minister of Canada proposed that the United Nations set up a commission to study how atomic energy could be controlled so as to limit its use to peaceful purposes, how atomic weapons could be eliminated from national armaments, and how safeguards could be set up so as to ensure that all nations would comply widi the obligations which they undertook to these ends. Thus fell to the United Nations one of the most intractable problems of international organization, a problem which might be looked on as the creation of a new sphere of international law.

The International Monetary Fund entered into a stand-by agreement with the government of Honduras authorizing drawings equivalent to $7.5 million for a one-year period. The arrangement was to serve as an assured secondary line of reserves to strengthen the country's international reserve position. The Fund entered into a stand-by arrangement authorizing the government of India to draw up to $100 million over the following year; this arrangement was made in support of India's reserve position, which had been under considerable strain in previous months.

Council The Ministerial Council of the Baghdad Pact held its second session in Teheran from April 16 to 19, 1956. The United States observer delegation was headed by Deputy Under Secretary of State Loy Henderson; the choice of Mr. Henderson, was reported to emphasize the importance attached by the United States to the pact, and to have been a direct response to diplomatic pressure from the United Kingdom. During the session, the question of United States participation in the pact through economic aid to the members was reported as a major focus of interest, and on April 18 the United States was reported to have become a full member of the Pact's Economic Committee, having agreed to contribute in technical advice and personnel and possibly in new equipment. Mr. Henderson was reported to have told the Council that the United States was prepared to discuss supplementing its programs of bilateral aid to member countries with a program of broader economic cooperation coordinated through the pact, thus meeting, according to the press, one of the major requests of the member countries. The delegates were reported to have reached unanimous agreement on a plan for combined efforts to combat subversion in member countries, as put forward by the Liaison Committee and the Counter-Subversion Committee; the crux of the plan was reported to be an agreement to form an international security organization to pool the information and resources of member countries, including combined police resources. The recommendations of the Economic Committee and of the Secretary-General for a permanent secretariat were also reported to have been unanimously approved.

1948 and 1949 were critical years of decision for many European nations caught in a web of events of such significance and suddenness as to call into question in a matter of months political traditions and concepts whose roots reached well back into die nineteenth century. Faced with the expanding east-west conflict, many countries felt themselves not only endangered and forced to look to their military defenses, but also obliged to choose one side or the other in die developing struggle.

The eleventh special session of the Trusteeship Council was 'Held at UN Headquarters in New York on April 10, 1961, to consider the agenda item: report of the UN plebiscite commissioner for the supervision of plebiscites in the southern and northern parts of the trust territory of the Cameroons under United Kingdom administration. Introducing the report, Mr. Abdoh, the UN plebiscite commissioner, noted that the report included all the pertinent facts about the organization, conduct, and results of the plebiscites. In order that the General Assembly would have ample time to examine the report during the resumed fifteenth session, the Council did not discuss it but limited itself to transmitting the report to the General Assembly, as provided in a draft resolution sponsored by Bolivia and India and approved by the Council. After adopting its draft report to the General Assembly on the item, the Council set June 1, 1961, as the tentative opening date for its 27th session.

The Executive and Liaison Committee of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) met in Berne, Switzerland, from May 15 to 20, 1961, preceded by meetings of several sub committees. Discussion was devoted chiefly to examining the reports of the various subcommittees, the recommendations of which were generally accepted, and to formulating proposals for the consideration of the congress meeting one year hence. As there was considerable hesitation regarding a system proposed by Switzerland in the Tariffication Subcommittee for the treatment of unprepaid or insufficiently prepaid mail, the Executive and Liaison Committee asked the subcommittee to reconsider the question in order to find out if the Swiss system could be applied generally by all member countries before recommending it to the congress. In view of its acceptance of all the recommendations of the Technical Assistance Development Subcommittee, the committee entrusted to the International Bureau, its administrative agent, the task of carrying out a supplementary inquiry into the technical assistance system of the UN and of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), with a view to submitting the results to the 1962 session of the subcommittee.

The resumed 30th session of the Economic and Social Council (ESOSOC) was held in New York on December 21 and 22, 1960, under the presidency of Mr. C. W. Schurmann (Netherlands). At the beginning of the 1135th meeting, the President read a note from the Secretary-General concerning the projected working agreement between the United Nations and the International Development Association (IDA), and introduced a draft resolution co-sponsored by Denmark and Japan callingon the President to negotiate with IDA with a view to drafting such an agreement. Mr. Makeev, speaking for the Soviet Union, stated that his government could not favor the draft resolution unless the proposed agreement included a provision recalling the terms of Article 58 of the Charter, relating to the coordination of the activities of the specialized agencies; the President replied that, although he was authorized to negotiate with representatives of IDA, he could not impose conditions. The delegates of China and New Zealand stated that they supported the draft resolution, and added that the essential point was to ensure liaison between the various organs dealing with development. The representative of Afghanistan likewise voiced support, pointing out that the draft resolution in essence merely requested the President to negotiate with representatives of IDA. The draft resolution was adopted without dissenting voice with the understanding that the President would take into account the observations of the members of the Council in the course of the negotiations

Mr. Jean Duvieusart (Belgian Christian Democrat) was elected President of the European Parliament on March 21, 1964, defeating Dutch Socialist Paulus Kapteyn by a vote of 57 to 51.

Meeting in Seoul on June 14–16, 1966, nine non-Communist Asian and Pacific nations declared dieir common determination to preserve their integrity and sovereignty in die face of external threats and invited other free countries in the region to join the newly formed Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC). Participating in the conference were Australia, the Republic of China, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). Laos attended as an observer.