International law developed originally as a body of norms concerning, and for the benefit of, States and governments. The protection of the rights of the individual was of secondary concern in its early history. Even today, most of its basic premises, rules and principles are still shaped by the inter-State system characterising contemporary international relations. However, in modern times, there has been rising global insistence that States, governments, institutions and laws exist to serve the people and there is a persistent, universal outcry for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the individual to be respected and assured. The human factor is emerging, at last, as the factor which should govern in every situation. With this objective in mind, the norms of international law are coming under persistent scrutiny from the point of view of whether they are conducive to the promotion and protection of the rights of the individual. And where the law has not yet developed responses for dealing with problems, old or new, affecting the rights of the individual, the international community expects of it that it should quickly show its capacity for imaginativeness and innovation and that it should demonstrate its ability to discharge its basic function: respecting, ensuring and advancing the dignity and rights of individuals throughout the world.

Data protection is the body of law which secures for every individual, whatever his nationality or residence, respect for his rights and fundamental freedoms, and in particular his right to privacy, with regard to automatic processing of personal data relating to him. It is an interesting case of a corpus of transnational law in the sense of legal rules which develop rapidly and simultaneously in municipal and international law, into a tissue binding together private and public entities across national borders.

One of the objects of the Bank for International Settlements, as laid down in Article 3 of its Statutes, is “to act as trustee or agent in regard to international financial settlements entrusted to it under agreements with the parties concerned”. This text was adopted pursuant to the Final Act of the Hague Conference of 20 January 1930, and has remained unaltered since then. In fact it formed an annex to the Constituent Charter of the Bank, the text of the Constituent Charter being itself embodied in the convention respecting the Bank for International Settlements entered into at The Hague between the Governments of Germany Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan of the one part and the Government of the Swiss Confederation of the other part. This Convention was one of the many separate but related agreements which were simultaneously executed, or approved in form, at The Hague on 20 January 1930 to give effect to the Young Plan and thus settle the reparations question.

The Netherlands has traditionally supported a three-mile limit for the breadth of the territorial sea. Even when, especially after the Second World War, a large number of states laid claim to territorial sea limits exceeding three miles, the Netherlands continued to adhere to the position that any unilateral extension of the territorial sea to twelve miles or more was inconsistent with international law. This position, which was defended both before and during the First and Second United Nations Conferences on the Law of the Sea (1958 and 1960), was consistent with the dominant Dutch interest at that time, viz., keeping the breadth of the territorial sea to a minimum, with as few exclusive fishing rights as possible beyond this limit.

The importance of a scholar like Hugo de Groot can be viewed in different ways. A systematic analysis of his works would clarify the coherence and depth, an historical approach would do the same for his sources and the extent of his originality. Other possibilities would be to trace the further development of his (legal and political) thinking or to ask what inspiration his works can still give towards the solution of problems today. Another approach has been adopted in the present contribution, viz., a discussion of Grotius' influence on a particular thinker of a later period, the Neapolitan lawyer and philosopher Giambattista Vico(1668–1744). Two aspects of his influence will be considered. In the first place, the question why Vico himself attributed such particular importance to Grotius. Vico even named Grotius as one of his “authors”. Vico employs the term “author” as a title of honour for his mentors in literature whom he considers especially important and in whose work he recognizes aspects of his pwn thinking which are of exceptional importance. However, Vico's attitude to Grotius does not consist solely of grateful admiration. In his principal work, the New Science, of which the first edition was published in 1725, and the last, totally rewritten, posthumous edition appeared in 1744, Vico's recognition of Grotius' merits is certainly still apparent, although his criticism has, by this stage, taken a dominant role. Vico's opposition to the predominant Cartesian rationalism, which he had already expressed in his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione of 1709 and in his De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda, liber primus sive metaphysicus of 1710, also extends to the rationalist school of natural law of which he considers Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf to be the main representatives.

On 8 December 1971, the Police Court (Politierechter) of Arnhem convicted a defendant of having committed overt and joint violence against persons: he had severely beaten a passer-by in a public street. The judgment attracted general attention because the Court imposed a partially conditional sentence subject to the special condition that the offender should work every week-end for a period of three months in the Sociaal-Paedagogisch Centrum ‘s Konings Jaght at Schaarsbergen near Arnhem. The defendant fulfilled this condition. Through counsel, he had himself offered to do this work.

Recent research papers, by an eminent historian, on America's “road to Nuremberg” may be taken as a starting-point for a renewed analysis of this jurisprudential – and political – experience. The red thread to be followed is Colonel Bernays' postulate on the prosecution of war criminals – shorthanded as “conspiracy/criminal organization” – already in an advanced stage of elaboration before the three deaths in March 1945 which changed the whole pattern of summing up the politics of the war and its lessons, for both victors and vanquished. The first to die that month, on the 12th, was Roosevelt. On the 28th Mussolini was murdered, and Hitler committed suicide on the 30th.

On 25 November 1981 the General Assembly of the United Nations by its Resolution 36/55 adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination based on Religion or Belief (hereinafter referred to as the Declaration). In doing so it has – albeit only partly – fulfilled a wish which it had expressed in 1962 during its 17th Session in a resolution by which the General Assembly requested the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to ask the Commission on Human Rights(the Commission) to prepare a draft declaration on the elimination of all forms of religious intolerance, to be submitted to the Assembly for consideration at its eighteenth session, and a draft international convention on the elimination of all forms of religious intolerance, to be submitted to the Assemblyif possible at its nineteenth session and, in any case, not later than at its twentieth session.

In George H. Sabine's great work, A History of Political Thought, he makes the following overall judgment on Grotius’ writing:

“Grotius' importance in the history of jurisprudence rests not upon a theory of the state or upon anything that he had to say about constitutional law, but upon his conception of a law regulating the relations between the sovereign states.”

This is the national report for the Netherlands on the above-named topic for the VIIth International Congress on Procedural Law, Würzburg September 1983. General reporters for this subject are Prof. Dr. Mauro Cappelletti (European University Institute, Florence) and Prof. Dr. Bryant Garth (Indiana University, Bloomington). In their introductory note to the national reporters they focus their attention on “how the legal system is or is not adapting to the problem of the representation of diffuse interests and more generally (on) the problem of the vindication of these rights”.

Although Professor Van Eikema Hommes' article “Grotius on Natural and International Law” contains some acute observations, it is submitted that it provides an incorrect view of Grotius' methodology, which results in a one-sided description of his system of international law. The aim of this paper is to criticize this view through a more careful exposition of Grotius' methodology, and from this to derive a broad insight into the basics of his law of nations, in particular the law of war and natural law, which will be assessed in the light of modern conceptions.

Grotius may be considered as the founder of the modern theory of international law and of the modern humanist theory of natural law. His famous work De hire belli ac pads libri tres, first published in 1625, combined an elaboration of his contributions, which formed the foundation to both these theories.

The secession of Belgium from the Netherlands in 1830 was both the signal of departure for the divergent development of law in the two countries, and a breakingpoint in the recently completed codification of private law. (The codes concerned, which had already been enacted, were to have entered into force on 1 February 1831). For the applicable law in the Netherlands, this meant, inter alia, that the French Code de Commerce would continue to be in force for another eight years. In the meantime an effort was made to adapt the Dutch national code to the now arisen situation in so far as regarding various points would be deviated to an even greater extent from the French example than had been done in previous bills. Before Holland was annexed by France, King Louis Napoleon had instructed a trimvirate to draw up a Dutch Commercial Code, and in accordance with his instructions, they had used the Code de Commerce as a starting point, though where necessary, they certainly took into account the conditions existing and the opinions prevailing in the Netherlands. The 1809 bill that resulted continued to play an important part in the later preparations of the codification. The result was that the Dutch Commercial Code which entered into force in 1838 was based to a lesser extent on the French example than was the case with the other codes – though it still followed the French example to a considerable degree – because on certain points it restored the Dutch law dating from before the French occupation, particularly with regard to a number of subjects concerning maritime law and insurance law, as well as bankruptcy law. With regard to the law on negotiable instruments, it was evidently considered less important, probably because traces of the original Dutch law were still discernable in the relevant provisions of the Code de Commerce. This resulted from the fact that in the preparation of the Ordonnance du Commerce of 1673 Colbert had invited Amsterdam merchants to Paris to advise him regarding the content of the law on negotiable instruments.

The Convention relating to the arrest of seagoing ships entered into force for the Netherlands on 20 July 1983. Its purpose is, first of all, to limit the possibility of arrest to maritime claims, as summed up in Article 1 (inter alia, claims arising from: collisions, salvage, carriage, wages, mortgage). In addition, Article 7 grants jurisdiction on the merits to the courts of the country where the arrest was made, if the domestic law of that country so provides, or in any of six situations enumerated in that Article.

It may not seem a very ambitious project to show which sources Grotius used in his two systematic expositions of International Law, De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis. One could simply refer to the indices of authors cited by Grotius in the English translations of the “Classics of International Law” series and analyse these impressive lists, looking, inter alia, for significant differences between them. However, such an approach, though no doubt useful, is only a very partial answer to the question of the “sources”, or perhaps even the “foundations”, of the Grotian system. I would suggest that it could even be seriously misleading. First of all, we have to assess Grotius' academic tools, with their mixture of references to the Scriptures, the patres ecclesiae and classical poets and philosophers in preference to sixteenth and seventeenth century authors. What is their function? As our interest is in international law, and not in philology or theology, we may well wonder how we are to deal with this mass of materials, most of which seems at first sight quite irrelevant to our subject. The abundance of wide ranging quotations in De jure belli ac pacis led Voltaire to accuse Grotius of pedantry, a charge that was also made against him as a politician and a diplomat by his contemporaries as well as by historians. If we do not consider this sufficient reason for disregarding, inter alia Plautus, Ovid, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine as “ornamental” rather than “structural” elements in the Grotian system, we may be encouraged by the example of as ardent an admirer of Grotius as Telders. His severe pruning of the overburdened text of De jure belli ac pacis was meant to reintroduce the book into general use as “the first treatise on international law ever written that aimed at completeness”.6

In 1918, just before the end of the First World War, a booklet of barely ninety pages was published in the Hague under the title “De Drie Treden van het Volkenrecht” (in English “The Three Stages in the Evolution of the Law of Nations”). For a work dealing with a subject relating to international law, it was an incredible success: it was twice reprinted in its Dutch version and was translated into French, German and English. The key to its success may well have been its simple plot: as in a Punch and Judy show, the cast had but two main characters – the good boy and the bad boy. The hero was Hugo Grotius, whose 400th birthday we are commemorating this year; the villain was Eméric de Vattel, a man who wrote a book in 1758 in which, according to the author of “The Three Stages”, he gave a Judas kiss to the hero precisely at the moment that he might have become victorious. The author leaves us in no doubt where his sympathies lie; the lines in which he characterizes the qualities of his two leading characters by comparing their Christian names have become quite famous: “the Dutchman is called Hugh (Huig in Dutch), a bluff and sturdy name; the other is called Emeric: the name of a balletmaster‥”.