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.

Sir Harold Nicholson had it about right. Diplomacy, he said,

Investment disputes have attracted their fair share of missionaries, fanatics, and lawyers in the Western Hemisphere. There may be evidence, though, that some relatively reasonable sceptics are making their voices heard.

The current administration has announced that one of the foreign policy objectives of the United States is to improve relations with developing countries by being more responsive to their concerns. The former administration was also moving in the same direction, as demonstrated by the Kissinger proposals to the seventh special session of the United Nations in 1975 and by U.S. agreement to the extensive plan of action called for by a final omnibus resolution of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Nairobi in May 1976.

Law in the setting of international relations is a curious institution. Idealists proclaim it to be the potential savior of the planet; cynics thumb their noses at it and direct attention to the difficulty of enforcing its rules. Even in the more regularized setting of international economic relations there is considerable ambiguity and conflict as to the role which law or rules should play, and much worry that recent economic stresses are creating a breakdown in the compliance with those few rules that do exist. Such breakdown can, it is alleged, lead at worst to trends similar to corresponding breakdowns in the 1930’s, or at least to the loss of one otherwise effective implement of diplomacy (rulemaking). Why negotiate new treaty rules if there is little chance they will be observed?

Expropriations in the later 1970’s often proceed more suavely than in the past. Straightforward seizure, to be sure, still has devotees. However, an increasingly favored approach is to induce the foreign investor to convey his property (or an interest therein) by an instrument that on its face represents an ordinary sale. That sale may be accompanied by a revision of the terms of some underlying contract between the investor and the government. The purpose of this article is to explore whether any body of rules now exists setting limits to the means that a government can use to obtain the investor’s consent. It then asks whether that law could be further developed so as to improve the quality of such negotiations and to cause them to produce more equitable results. Thereby it would indirectly improve the security and efficiency of the whole process of foreign direct investment.

At the Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law held in Geneva from 1974 to 1977, it was pointed out that eighty percent of the victims of armed conflict since World War II have been created in noninternational armed conflict. Whatever the precision of this estimate, as of the mid-1970’s a number of important actors in world affairs were concerned about destruction of human values in internal war and sought restraints on that form of violence. This concern produced, as of June 10, 1977, a Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 relating to the protection of victims of noninternational armed conflict.

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.

Protection of the physical environment of man is one of the most elemental and pressing problems of today’s world. In the past dozen years or so numerous dramatic and disastrous events have focused domestic and international attention on the growing danger of environmental deterioration and provided stimulus for national and international action to protect man against all kinds of pollution hazards. Among these environmental hazards marine pollution is perhaps the most dangerous in the long run. The sea, which covers about 70 percent of the planet, plays a vital role in maintaining the fundamental biological and ecological balance by supplying much of the oxygen on which life ultimately depends.

On July 1, 1957, the United States and Pakistan signed a Convention for the Avoidance of Double Taxation and the Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with respect to Taxes on Income. Although, at that time, it was one of the few double taxation treaties that the United States had entered into with a developing country, it followed, for the most part, the template established by earlier tax treaties negotiated with the more developed nations. A major distinguishing factor, however, was the inclusion of a tax-sparing credit provision, by means of which the coverage of the foreign tax credit accorded U.S. taxpayers for certain foreign taxes paid or deemed to have been paid was extended to certain taxes that were ordinarily levied by Pakistan but which had been “spared” as part of the latter’s incentive program for the stimulation of economic development. Three other treaties—with India, Israel, and the United Arab Republic—presented to the Senate for ratification at approximately the same time also contained tax-sparing provisions. However, none of these tax-sparing provisions was ever put into effect. The Convention with Pakistan was approved with a reservation excluding the sparing provisions, on the basis that the Pakistani tax concession which was to be credited for “phantom” taxes deemed paid had expired. The other three treaties never received the assent of the Senate and were subsequently withdrawn from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1964. No other tax-sparing provisions have been negotiated by the United States, although other tax incentive schemes have been presented to the Senate. These, too, have failed to be approved. The failure to agree to any such provision utilizing tax incentives as a form of development assistance is often deemed to be the major reason for the notable dearth of tax conventions between the United States and the developing states, as the latter are particularly interested in the inclusion of tax-sparing credit provisions in the double taxation treaties that they agree to sign. This failure is, in turn, rooted in the severe and at times persuasive criticism levied against the principle of granting tax-sparing credits—especially in the form in which they were to be granted in the four aforementioned treaties—and in the consequent hostility of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, as perceived by those responsible for negotiating U.S. tax treaties, toward provisions of this sort.

Recent events in Angola and Rhodesia have drawn public attention to the problems which arise from the use of mercenaries in armed conflicts and civil wars. Renewed interest in the subject has also been shown by international bodies and conferences, including the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, which recently adopted a treaty article on the status of mercenaries. This article examines the international legal rules applicable to states in relation to the recruitment and organizing of mercenary forces, the appropriate domestic legislation to give effect to such rules, and the status to be accorded mercenaries for the purposes of the laws of war.

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.

Few areas of the world have had such a profound effect upon history as that of the Near East. Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, Phoenicia, Syria, ancient Israel and Judah, and the smaller kingdoms and states of the area interacted through three thousand years until Rome occupied almost the entire area. The Fertile Crescent is not a vast area, so the various civilizations and cultures were in frequent contact.

Judges of the International Court of Justice have a variety of vehicles through which they may express their judicial opinions. There are, in the first place, the judgments and opinions of the Court—results of the collegial deliberations—to which every judge may contribute. If, however, the judgment or opinion of the Court does not represent “in whole or in part the unanimous opinion of the judges, any judge shall be entitled to deliver a separate opinion.” And, despite misgivings on the part of some scholars early in the experience of the Permanent Court of International Justice, this right conferred by Article 57 of the Statute of the Court has been consistently interpreted as allowing individual and joint separate and dissenting opinions. Finally, Article 95 of the Rules of Court, adopted on April 14, 1978, provides, inter alia, that “[a]ny judge may, if he so desires, attach his individual opinion to the judgment, whether he dissents from the majority or not; a judge who wishes to record his concurrence or dissent without stating his reasons may do so in the form of a declaration.”

The sixth session of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea was held in New York from May 23 to July 15, 1977.

The Conference confirmed two procedural decisions taken at the close of the fifth sesison—to devote the first two or three weeks of the sixth session to Committee I (deep seabed) problems and to entrust the President and Committee Chairmen with the preparation of an informal composite text of the treaty as a whole later in the session. In the interim between the fifth and sixth sessions, Minister Jens Evensen of Norway, Vice-President of the Conference, who at an earlier stage of the Conference had held lengthy informal meetings on economic zone matters with marked success, arranged for an intersessional meeting in Geneva early in 1977 on the deep seabeds sytem of exploitation, to which all conference participants were invited. Minister Evensen continued these efforts at the Conference itself, reporting to the Chairman of the First Committee.

The entry of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into the world community has renewed an old question in a new global setting: Is China a help or a hindrance to international law and order? What impact, if any, has China made upon the evolution of the Charter-based international legal order? Conversely, what impact, if any, has the international legal order had on the Chinese conception and practice of international law? China’s participation for over six years in the activities of the United Nations, the specialized agencies, and UN-sponsored conferences, many of which are engaged in the development and clarification of law, now makes it possible to subject the above questions to a disciplined behavioral analysis.

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.