The international legal community seems to be in a state of transition. Contemporary perspectives of international law are still generally dominated by traditional concepts of international community as a grouping of sovereign nation States the rules of which are in in principle based on consent. But at the same time there exists a prevailing impression that traditional international law is too cumbersome and archaic in order to cope with the pressing needs of mankind. A ‘World Public Order’ is demanded by not small an amount of political and legal writers.

Temporary laws or measures arise in different circumstances to deal with a wide array of perceived problems or concerns. This essay deals with one specific kind of temporary measures, which are provided for in international human rights treaties: ‘preferential treatments’ or ‘positive measures’, as they are called. The essay examines whether these measures undermine the predictability and stability of the norm of equality on which behalf they are said to have been adopted. The essay argues that these measures will be inconsistent with and destablise equality only if equality is understood narrowly as a principle that only requires sameness of treatment rather than the more substantive notion of equality (equality of opportunity) that this essay endorses and advances.

Apart from the proverbial exception to the rule, all changes in the composition of the international community of States resulting from State succession, whether through decolonization or through the uniting or separation of States, are reflected in the membership of the United Nations. In the first 50 years of its existence the number of member States of the organization has almost quadrupled, and this growth is to a large extent attributable to a multitude of cases of State succession, the majority of which resulted from decolonization. When these ‘new’ States began to outnumber the ‘old’ ones, State succession, and in particular the international legal implications of State succession, became a ‘hot issue’ on the UN agenda, especially on the International Law Commission's (ILC) agenda.

On 21 June 1985 the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) adopted the UNCITRAL Law on International Commercial Arbitration, six years after the Commission had decided to request the Secretariat to commence work on a model law on arbitral procedure.

Howard Tolley, Jr. divided the development of the United Nations Human Rights Commission's activities from 1946 to 1986 into three distinctive periods:

– a Western dominated body of 18 (later 21) members engaged in standardsetting and promotional activities (1947–1966);

– an Afro-Asian dominated body of 32 members making self-determination and racial equality priority agenda items and systematically attacking Western colonialism (1967–1979); and

– a 43 member body with a more complex political voting pattern aiming at global protection of human rights (1980–1986).

Since the end of the Second World War the Governments of several States have taken a series of measures designed to expropriate or nationalize private property of diverse kinds belonging to nationals as well as to foreigners. In Eastern Europe, particularly, entire sectors of the nationalizing States' economies were affected by such measures.

The application, or putting into effect, of any legal act presupposes a logically prior stage: its interpretation. Everyone who applies a legal act is interpreting it, and, in doing so, is, consciously or unconsciously, following a certain method. Viewed as an intellectual exercise, legal interpretation presupposes the existence of an act creating or determining rights and obligations, prescribing action or abstention from action: in short, designed to give rise to legal consequences. Every system of law deriving from formal sources necessarily involves some such process. On the other hand, it is difficult to speak of legal interpretation properly so called in the context of a system of moral precepts such as the law of nature, which remain more or less indefinite and which are arrived at by means of conjecture based on pure reason, and do not entail any immediate juridical consequences. Gény put it this way:

“Proceedings on the assumption of the absolute power of human reason to discover the laws of human nature, both in principle and in detail, the natural law school intended to create, by the mere force of thinking, a complete system of absolute, immutable, directly and universally applicable law that the legislature had only to put into words,…”

When statements made before the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal (the ‘Tribunal’) have exhibited some degree of divergence from representations or conduct made at a different point in time, estoppel and associated concepts have often proved to be of considerable assistance in determining between the competing versions presented. This article will assess the application of the doctrine of estoppel and related concepts by the Tribunal and compare its jurisprudence with the position of such principles as accepted in international law.

The aim of this paper is to summarize the attitude and practice of Japan with regard to the immunity of the property of foreign states. However, the number of cases of this kind in Japan is rather limited. Generally, the attitude or practice of a state can be determined by examining the practice of its legislature, judiciary and executive. In the case of Japan, however, there are no special laws or regulations concerning the question of execution against property owned by a foreign state. Furthermore, no official views have been stated by the executive on the immunity of a foreign state from Japanese jurisdiction. Therefore, the principal source of Japanese practice concerning state immunity is constituted by court decisions. It is possible to learn much about the position of the Japanese Government through analogies drawn from these cases, and from foreign cases in which Japan has been the defendant. Some treaty provisions concluded by Japan concerning the jurisdictional immunity of state property will also be mentioned.

This article deals with attitudes in the United Kingdom to the attachment or execution of State property pursuant to a judicial ruling by a Court. It is divided into two parts: the first covers the attitude and practice of the United Kingdom with regard to the attachment or execution of foreign state property within the former's jurisdiction. The second comments on the attitude and practice of the United Kingdom Government to attachment or execution of its property located within the jurisdiction of foreign states.

In December 1978 the Dutch Government ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as its Optional Protocol, which contains the possibility for individuals to submit complaints to the Human Rights Committee. According to Article 49 ICCPR and Article 9 Optional Protocol both documents entered into force in the Netherlands three months later, on 11 March 1979. The ratification process of the ICCPR had taken so long (the ICCPR was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966) because of the Dutch practice of eliminating, before the ratification of a treaty, any (possible) conflicts between national legislation and the treaty in question. This can be achieved, as has indeed been done, either by making the necessary and appropriate reservations, or by changing national law accordingly. It has always been the intention of the Dutch legislature that all foreseeable conflicts would have been eliminated by the time a treaty enters into force.

Since 1813 the Kingdom of the Netherlands has concluded over 6,000 treaties. It has a long standing practice, which took shape particularly after World War II, when international relations became part of the daily life of nations and the number of treaties increased dramatically, and again after the revision of the Dutch Constitution in 1953, when the relationship between the powers of the Government and Parliament regarding treaties was finally established. Current practice is determined by two characteristics. The first is the constitutional provision that, except in certain specified cases, consent for the Kingdom of the Netherlands to be bound by a treaty cannot be given unless the treaty has been approved by Parliament. In practice the rule is interpreted in such a way as to strike a balance between the Government's need to conduct an efficient and effective foreign policy and Parliament's need to exercise proper supervision over that policy. The second characteristic is that, in applying these constitutional provisions (for text see Appendix 1), the term ‘treaty’ is interpreted substantively. Whether an instrument substantively constitutes a treaty is also a matter of interpretation, since international instruments vary so much in form and content that many of them are scarcely covered by the brief constitutional provisions on treaties.

The two consecutive Judgments by the International Court of Justice of 1 July 1994 (‘the July Judgment’) and 15 February 1995 (‘the February Judgment’) in the jurisdiction and admissibility phase of Qatar v. Bahrain have already attracted attention from writers. The Judgments have provided a focus of interest for the law of treaties, and attention has also been concentrated on three legal questions to which the judgments were of particular relevance: the question of whether sovereign consent is necessary to the manner of seisin employed as well as to jurisdiction itself, the emergence of the concept of a partial decision, and the extension of the use of framework agreements to found the jurisdiction of the court. But this Article considers a different question, a key finding of fact in the February Judgment which was crucial to the decision of the Court that it had jurisdiction. This finding was that the linguistic meaning of wording at the heart of one of the Arabic texts on which Qatar relied in order to give the Court jurisdiction entitled either party to submit the case to the Court unilaterally.

The situation in Thailand with regard to the subject under review is a matter of particular interest in many respects, and as such deserves close attention. To determine the extent to which a foreign state may claim that its property is immune from attachment or execution pursuant to a judicial order or ruling made by a court of law in Thailand, requires an examination of the relevant law and practice prevailing in that country on two basic questions, namely, sovereign immunity or exemption of foreign states from territorial jurisdiction and from execution in respect of their property, and the capacity of foreign states to sue and be sued before a Thai court.

The unprecedented expansion and growing complexity of international economic relations over the last decades have significantly affected the scope and nature of existing international law. Numerous bilateral investment trade agreements (BITs), and multilateral instruments such as the GATT, NAFTA and the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) have added to the increasing body of international trade and investment law. From the perspective of general international law, this emerging lex mercatoria is a force to be reckoned with. It is the ‘interface of international business/commercial law with public international law has never been an easy exercise. An issue that perhaps best identifies the complexity of such an endeavour relates to the responsibility of the State for non-State actors in the area of commercial transactions. While this issue has yet to be clarified fully in international law, it is one that is of particular importance to international economic relations.

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.

On 2 December 2004, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution A/Res/59/38 concerning the new United Nations Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property without vote. This Convention constitutes the result of 27 years of work within the ILC and the 6th Committee of the General Assembly. It covers the immunity of foreign states and their property from the jurisdiction of the courts of a forum state. Since the evolution of the relative immunity concept in the judicial practice of states, according to which states no longer enjoy absolute, but only relative immunity for acta jure imperii, national courts have set up different criteria for determining the immunity of foreign states. The present Convention now aims at harmonizing state practice in this field and thus at enhancing legal certainty for both states and private contractors in their – mostly economic – relations. In the discussions during the elaboration of this text, the five most disputed issues regarding state immunity have turned out to be the notion of the state, the definition of the term ‘commercial transaction’, state enterprises, employment contracts as well as measures of constraint. This article presents the drafting history as well as the provisions of the Convention and makes the first attempt to discuss its main provisions. It provides the reader also with the necessary background information that will not easy to be found elsewhere.