During a meeting of our Editorial Board which took place as far back as October 1990, we found ourselves debating the question whether closed or semi-closed systems as they could be seen to emerge in various fields of international law (e.g., GATT practice, community legal order) would become a potential risk, constituting a threat to the global unity and efficacy of the international legal order. Bruno Simma's thorough and stimulating analysis in the 16th issue of this Yearbook (1985) entitled ‘Self-contained Regimes’ additionally fuelled the very early stages of our preliminary thoughts with regard to the scope and implications of the question raised.

Diplomatic law is one of the oldest areas of international law. Long before States could be said to be the subjects of international law, primitive societies felt the need to maintain relations with one another through an envoy. In due course this resulted in the principle of inviolability of the envoy. When permanent diplomatic missions were established in the 15th century, this principle of inviolability was extended to include the residence and household of the envoy. The evolution of diplomatic law since then has closely mirrored the development of international law in general. A striking example is the creation of permanent missions to international organisations since the First World War. The signing of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in 1961 and several other conventions in subsequent years marked the climax of this development.

In his search for ‘Self-contained regimes’ in the 1985 issue of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, Bruno Simma addressed diplomatic law, human rights law and the law of the European Community. He did not consider the most traditional of all ‘special branches’ of international law: the law of war. Although present-day authorities no longer see the modern law of armed conflict as a corpus of law seperate from international law, it is often still considered to be a lex specialis within international law. This special character – although certainly in certain areas still controversial – is notably predicated on the (traditionally) sharp distinction between the conditions of peace and war. Although war ‘in a technical sense’, to use Prof. Dinstein's term, has lost its prominence, if indeed it ever had much, the legal relevance of a distinction between war and peace, or armed conflict or not, is still recognised in international legal instruments as well as by many authors.

Undoubtedly, human rights treaties have some special characteristics; but it seems important first of all to identify the phenomenon of the ‘human rights treaty’ for the purposes of the present article. An overwhelming number of treaties exist on the protection of rights of individuals, ranging from bilateral treaties to conventions with well over a hundred parties. Not all of these treaties can be said to be on the protection of ‘human rights’, as in international legal parlance not all the rights of private persons which are protected by treaty are called ‘human’ rights. But it is impossible to draw sharp lines as grey zones as well as a certain degree of overlapping appear to exist. Thus, for instance, property rights protected by treaty will generally not be considered as ‘human rights’, but Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, to name just one example, concerns ‘the peaceful enjoyment of [one's] possessions.’ By the same token, rights that are also currently identified as ‘human rights’ appear to be of a widely differing character. The same is true for the treaties in which they are enshrined as well as for the mechanisms of supervision of their application that are provided for in these treaties.

‘Need I apologize for my choice of subject? Some may say it belongs to the realm of exotics of law. Some may ask: Why deal with issues so remote when there are so many much closer to us still awaiting a solution? Why reach so far?’ With these words the late Judge Manfred Lachs introduced his 1964 lecture at the Hague Academy of International Law on the topic ‘The International Law of Outer Space’. The subject is no longer exotic today. Within the three decades following the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the use of space technology is now widespread, not only for military but also for civilian purposes, including satellites for communications, meteorology, television and radio broadcasting and other applications. Remote sensing data is employed in agriculture and resource management as well as in environmental monitoring. Writing a quarter of a century later than Lachs, in a prologue to a collection of articles by “a new generation of space law scholars’, K.-H. Böckstiegel notes:

‘Space law is coming of age. What started out as an exotic field of law and then continued with the discussion and codification of legal rules, following the development of exploratory space activities, is now confronted with the challenge of arriving at just and effective rules for the use of space serving many practical and conflicting economic, political and military interests.’

The purpose of this Article is to review international environmental law as, in a certain sense, a special field of international law. In doing this, it is not the intention to argue, or even imply, that international environmental law constitutes in some way a special branch or regime separate from the mainstream of traditional or classical international law. Rather, what we will be doing is to look, firstly, at certain ways in which special features of the environment as a subject matter of international law have resulted in particular solutions, applications or rules within the general principles of international law which, if not necessarily unique to, are at least particularly characteristic of, environmental law. Secondly, we shall see, however, that the attempt to provide a necessary legal framework to meet the problems of the environment, both alone and in relation to other perceived problems of the modern world, are stretching and possibly straining the limits of classical international law. The result is that international environmental law is at present also characterised by the rise of novel theories, many of which are not universally accepted, but which may, neverthless be very influential in the whole field, political, legal and scientific, of environmental protection.

This article has the limited ambition of analyzing some special features of the law of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor organization, the World Trade Organization (WTO), in the framework of general international law. The GATT, as is the case with all those international organizations which have their own substantive law and are not merely vehicles for international negotiation and co-ordination, inevitably is a special branch of international law. As with all such branches it develops rules which deviate from general international law and which further refine and adapt the rules and principles of international law. In respect of GATT, as in some other exceptional cases (EC), there is even reason to ask the question whether it has or has not become a self-contained regime in international law. That is to say that the system's countermeasures are not the normal countermeasures of international law, such as reprisals and the exceptio non-adimpleti contractus in treaty law, but are entirely separate from those normal countermeasures and are regulated so as to limit the freedom of States to have recourse to them. Although Riphagen has described the GATT not so much as a self-contained system, but as a number of ‘conventional derogations’ from general rules of international law, there is reason to look again at this assessment given the evolution that has taken place in the GATT system since then.

The purpose of this article is not to attempt to establish whether or not the EC legal system is a ‘self-contained regime’ in the sense implied by Simma. It is submitted that given the origin of that system as part of the international legal order, as a system which the Court itself described as ‘a new legal order of international law’ EC law cannot be conceived as totally distinct or self-contained. Nor, in this author's contention, is there much to be gained from such an approach as a contribution to the understanding of the current state of the relationship between international and European law. This article takes a rather different approach to the analysis of European law as a separate or distinct branch of international law without attempting to assess just how absolute or complete that process of separation might be.

There is widespread agreement about the fact that the European Community is a highly complex legal system situated outside the mainstream of public international law. Nobody would deny that Community law forms an ‘autonomous legal order’ in the sense proposed by Sørensen, but then, that characteristic is shared by many other international organisations. Yet, many authors, among which are the majority of specialists in EC law, go far beyond this and argue that EC law is situated outside the ‘system of international law’ altogether. Although seemingly anchored in international law (as it was created by an international treaty) the European Community has been drifting into uncharted waters. It is often considered to be a ‘sui generis’ organisation, no longer part of international law though not yet a (federal) State on its own. The European Court of Justice, for its part, has never stated in so many words that EC law is entirely outside the scope of public international law, but some of its dicta seem to point in that direction.