The International Court of Justice was brought into being by the Charter of the United Nations (Articles 7(1), 36(3), and 92-96), and by the Statute of the Court which was made an integral part of the Charter; both of which instruments were signed at San Francisco on June 26, 1945. The most important difference between the Statute of the new Court and that of its predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice, on which the new Statute was based, was that the new Court was to be one of the “principal organs” of the United Nations. The Charter and the new Statute entered into force on October 24, 1945. After the election of the Court’s first members the new Court met for the first time in the Peace Palace at The Hague on April 1, 1946, under the presidency of Judge Guerrero, with Judge Basdevant as Vice-President.

Over the last two decades, the protection of the environment has become a necessity so widely recognized that environmental concerns have pervaded most fields of international law, including the international law of human rights. In 1976 the European Commission of Human Rights dismissed an application on the ground that “no right to nature conservation [was] as such included among the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Convention and in particular by Arts 2, 3, or 5.” In 1993, however, the Commission found that the erection and operation of a waste and water treatment station near the domicile of the applicant was such a nuisance as to amount to a violation of her right to a private life. This development in the case law of the European Commission reflects a growing awareness of the links between protection of human rights and protection of the environment.

A distinction has become entrenched in United States law between treaties that are “self-executing” and those that are not. The precise nature of this distinction—indeed, its very existence—is a matter of some controversy’ and much confusion. More than one lower federal court has pronounced the distinction to be the “most confounding” in the United States law of treaties. A tremendous amount of scholarship has sought to clarify this distinction, but the honest observer cannot but agree with John Jackson’s observation that “[t]he substantial volume of scholarly writing on this issue has not yet resolved the confusion” surrounding it. The continuing, and remarkably candid, judicial confusion over this issue will, I hope, excuse yet another attempt to bring some coherence to the doctrine. In this article, I argue that much of the doctrinal disarray and judicial confusion is attributable to the failure of courts and commentators to recognize that for some time four distinct “doctrines” of self-executing treaties have been masquerading as one. With a view to furthering the development of doctrine in conformity with constitutional allocations of power, I identify these four “doctrines,” as reflected in the self-execution decisions of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts, and I examine the very different types of analysis that they call for.

The provisions relating to the Security Council in the United Nations Charter of 1995 do not look much different from those in the Charter of 1945. Articles 23 and 27 were amended in 1965 to increase the membership of the Security Council from its original eleven to its present fifteen, with a corresponding change from seven to nine votes for the adoption of resolutions. No change was made in the five permanent members’ veto power over substantive matters. Article 109 was amended in 1968 to increase from seven to nine the number of votes in the Security Council needed to complement a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly for the convening of a Charter review conference. Otherwise, c’est la même chose.

One of the most difficult areas for maritime boundary delimitation is the seas adjacent to Central East Asia. This area, which encompasses the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Yellow Sea, is surrounded by the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan (the Republic of China), Japan, North and South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Russia. Only a few of the maritime boundaries in the area have been settled, leaving most open to dispute. (See map 1, p. 726.) Efforts to settle the unresolved boundaries have not moved forward. Much has been written about the boundary disputes in this area, and efforts to resolve them have explored means other than delimitation.

The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, signed by the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the exchange of letters between the PLO Chairman and Israel’s Prime Minister, both agreed upon in September 1993, have set the stage for a process of reconciliation and the settlement of the long and bitter conflict over Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. The Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area established the date—May 4, 1999—by which a permanent agreement must enter into effect. So far, the negotiations between the two parties have concentrated mainly on institutional arrangements, such as the nature of the Palestinian administration during the interim period, and other matters of public interest. At this stage, the parties are not expected to address matters that directly affect the interests of individuals, including the right of individuals to regain possession of property left behind because of the hostilities, or to receive compensation for such property. The discussion of most of these private claims has been deferred to the final stage of the negotiations, concerning a permanent status agreement, which is due to commence no later than May 4, 1996.

Too much has been written lately about the limited approach to human rights at Dumbarton Oaks, the struggle at the San Francisco Conference, and the great flowering of declarations, conventions, covenants and instruments to implement them in the last fifty years. Instead of adding another retelling of these more than twice-told tales, this essay tries to look at the origin of two less known contributions to the law of human rights—the broad nondiscrimination clause which added a more practical meaning to the vague “human rights and fundamental freedoms” phrase; and the bold addition of economic and social rights to the more traditional civil and political rights.

For half a century, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and national prosecutions of World War II cases remained the major instances of criminal prosecution of offenders against fundamental norms of international humanitarian law. The heinous activities of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the use of poison gas by Iraq against its Kurdish population are among the many atrocities left unpunished by either international or national courts. Some treaties were adopted that provide for national prosecution of offenses of international concern and, in many cases, for universal jurisdiction; but, with a few exceptions, these treaties were not observed. Notwithstanding the absence of significant prosecutions, an international consensus on the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Principles, the applicability of universal jurisdiction to international crimes, and the need to punish those responsible for egregious violations of international humanitarian law slowly solidified. The International Law Commission, veterans of the Nuremberg and Tokyo proceedings, individuals such as Rafael Lemkin (who advocated the adoption of the Genocide Convention) and a handful of academics (most notably M. Cherif Bassiouni), among others, helped keep alive the heritage of Nuremberg and the promise of future prosecutions of serious violators of international humanitarian law.

Income tax law and human rights law operate in quite separate worlds, but a proposal recently presented to Congress brings them together. The Clinton administration has advocated a tax on certain unrealized capital gains of expatriates and some of its opponents have claimed that it constitutes a violation of human rights law. They evoke the hardships visited on those who fled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and from the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic more recently. They assert that a similar wrong would be inflicted by this proposed tax on those who surrender United States citizenship. The reaction of this writer is that of Justice Cardozo to the charge that twentieth-century administrative practices are “Star Chamber” procedures: “Historians may find hyperbole in the sanguinary simile.”