The history, operation and tasks of the International Law Commission (ILC) have often been described and its success in codifying general international law is well-known and widely acknowledged. The conduct of international relations today is unthinkable without such basic instruments, first drafted by the Commission, as the conventions on diplomatic and consular relations, the law of treaties and the law of the sea. Moreover, other ILC drafts that have not been adopted as treaties have had a long-term effect on the development of international law; for example, the Draft Declaration on the Rights and Duties of States, the Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, and the Model Rules on Arbitral Procedure.

The development of feminist jurisprudence in recent years has made a rich and fruitful contribution to legal theory. Few areas of domestic law have avoided the scrutiny of feminist writers, who have exposed the gender bias of apparently neutral systems of rules. A central feature of many western theories about law is that the law is an autonomous entity, distinct from the society it regulates. A legal system is regarded as different from a political or economic system, for example, because it operates on the basis of abstract rationality, and is thus universally applicable and capable of achieving neutrality and objectivity. These attributes are held to give the law its special authority. More radical theories have challenged this abstract rationalism, arguing that legal analysis cannot be separated from the political, economic, historical and cultural context in which people live. Some theorists argue that the law functions as a system of beliefs that make social, political and economic inequalities appear natural. Feminist jurisprudence builds on certain aspects of this critical strain in legal thought. It is much more focused and concrete, however, and derives its theoretical force from immediate experience of the role of the legal system in creating and perpetuating the unequal position of women.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.

In this case before a Chamber of the International Court of Justice, El Salvador and Honduras, by a Special Agreement dated May 24, 1986, requested that the Chamber delimit the land frontier and determine the legal status of certain islands and waters in the general area of the Gulf of Fonseca. The gulf, located on the Pacific coast of Central America, is bordered by El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Nicaragua filed an application for permission to intervene in the case on November 17, 1989, pursuant to Article 62 of the Statute of the Court, which permits a state to request intervention if the state considers “that it has an interest of a legal nature which may be affected by the decision in the case.”

In September 1984, the UN Secretary-General (Respondent) offered five-year fixed-term contracts as interpreters to Rong Qiu, Kefu Zhou, and Jiping Yao (Applicants), who had just completed the UN training course for interpreters at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages. The letters of appointment accepted by the Applicants stated that they were “on secondment from the Government of China.” They received very good performance ratings, and in the spring of 1989 their department recommended that they be offered probationary, career-track appointments when their contracts expired.

In a consolidated constitutional proceeding, fourteen claimants, all citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), attacked the constitutionality of that clause of the German Unification Agreement providing that property expropriated during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany during the period 1945-1949 was not to be returned to the original owners and that the owners could only be compensated in money. The Court confirmed the constitutionality of the provision and thus took a first step toward clarifying one of the greatest obstacles to significant investment in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR): unclear property ownership, making it impossible to say with certainty who ultimately owned much of the property in the former GDR.

In 1978 a French company (Pipeline) and the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) entered into a contract (governed by Iranian law) for the supply and erection of gas pipeline installations linking certain Iranian cities. Apparently not paid for its services, Pipeline brought an action in France against NIGC. NIGC’s plea of immunity was denied by the Court of Appeal of Versailles, whose decision was reversed by the Court of Cassation.

In the Notes and Comments section of the January 1991 issue of the Journal, Professor Richard Lillich presented a thorough and timely analysis of the Soering decision of the European Court of Human Rights, a significant addition to international human rights law. His evaluation of the Soering judgment and his reflections on several of its wider ramifications are especially relevant to the United States military, for the decision constitutes a serious threat to the administration of U.S. military justice overseas and to the treaty relationships between the United States and its NATO allies. A recent European case, Short v. Kingdom of the Netherlands, demonstrates that this threat is far from hypothetical.

The forty-third session of the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) was held in Geneva from April 29 to July 19, 1991, and was chaired by Ambassador Abdul Koroma of Sierra Leone. During the session, the last of the ILC’s current five-year term of office, the Commission adopted full sets of draft articles on three of the subjects on its agenda. It completed the second reading, or final adoption, of the draft on jurisdictional immunities of states and their property, and approved on first reading its articles on the law of the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, and the Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. In its report to the General Assembly, the Commission recommended that the Assembly convene a diplomatic conference charged with concluding a convention on the basis of the draft articles on jurisdictional immunities. The drafts on watercourses and crimes were sent to governments for their comments, which the Commission requested they submit by January 1, 1993. The ILC will then give each of those drafts a second reading, taking into account the observations received from states. In addition to the progress made on these topics, the Commission considered reports on the three remaining subjects on its agenda: international liability for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law, relations between states and international organizations (second part of the topic) and state responsibility.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which met from January 28 to March 8, 1991, in the shadow of the gulf war, nevertheless completed what many observers considered its most productive session in recent history. The Commission took action on a record of nineteen country situations—creating new rapporteurs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait—began plans for a 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and set up an intersessional working group to complete a draft declaration on disappearances. The most important long-term accomplishment of the Commission, however, was the creation of a five-member working group to investigate cases of arbitrary detention throughout the world.

After six years of study by its Committee on the Enforcement of Human Rights Law, the sixty-fourth Conference of the International Law Association, held in Queensland, Australia, from August 19 to 25, 1990, approved by consensus a set of standards to assist human rights bodies in monitoring states of emergency. These standards, designated the Queensland Guidelines for Bodies Monitoring Respect for Human Rights during States of Emergency, complement on the enforcement side the substantive norms found in the Paris Minimum Standards of Human Rights Norms in a State of Emergency, adopted by the ILA in 1984.