On January 1, 1976, some 2,700 articles from 137 developing countries and territories became eligible to enter the United States free of import duties. By this overnight elimination of tariffs that had ranged as high as 28 percent, on articles as diverse as sausage and spacecraft, from countries as different as Brazil and Bangladesh, the United States became the twenty-third and most recent industrialized country to implement a “Generalized System of Preferences” (GSP), permitting imports from developing countries to enter at lower rates of duty than those applicable to the same products from industrialized countries.

The failure at the 63rd International Labor Conference (Geneva, 1977) to adopt the Report of the Committee on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations was regarded by many delegates as yet another example of denial of due process by that organization and may have influenced the United States in its decision to withdraw from ILO. The decision of the Conference, although primarily political, had certain legal implications in so far as it suggested that an occupying power, such as Israel, may not apply international labor conventions to which it is a party to territories that it occupies.

Since shortly after the 1967 Middle East war, Israel has sought to reduce its dependence on imported oil by exploiting the resources of captured Egyptian territory. Until recently attention was centered on the Sinai’s Abu Rhodeis fields, which in 1974 were reported to be meeting 55 percent of Israel’s needs. In 1975, however, these fields were returned to Egypt as part of the second Egypt-Israel Disengagement Agreement. Previously unexploited areas of the eastern Gulf of Suez then became the subject of Israeli efforts, and by the fall of 1976 exploratory drilling was in progress off the Sinai coast. On November 25, 1977, Israel announced that this drilling had resulted in a commercial strike, and on March 29, 1978, it was reported that commercial production had begun. The question whether Israel may rightfully exploit the oil resources of the Gulf thus came sharply into focus.

In 1975 the UN General Assembly established a 20-member Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People to prepare a program of implementation to enable the Palestinians to exercise the rights recognized in Resolution 3236 adopted by the General Assembly the previous year. Among the rights affirmed in that resolution is “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted …” The Committee’s report and recommendations were completed and submitted to the Secretary-General for transmittal to the Security Council in June 1976.

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.