The Draft Convention on the Law of the Sea (hereafter referred to as “the Draft Convention”) includes provisions which refer to rules of public international law but which give no indication of either their content or their source. In this paper these provisions are called “rules of reference”. This reference does not mean that the application of the projected Convention itself is overridden by the rules of reference indicated. On the contrary, the indicated rules are incorporated into the projected Convention by reference, as is demonstrated in section 3 infra.

It is the purpose of this article to review a number of aspects of Dutch law and practice concerning the fundamental human “right of everyone to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”, usually referred to as the right to leave and to return, in particular with regard to the period following World War II, and against the background of the international developments on this point which are most important for the Netherlands.

One of the most interesting regulations to appear in the 1979 volume of the Official Journal of the European Communities was Council Regulation (EEC) No. 954/79 of 15 May 1979 concerning the ratification by Member States of, or their accession to, the United Nations Convention on a Code of Conduct for Liner Conferences.

On 10 December 1979 the Governing Board of the International Energy Agency (IEA) met in Paris at ministerial level. The subject of discussion was the action to be taken to meet problems in the field of oil supply, and the implementation of the “Declaration” by the Western Summit Conference in Tokyo on this matter. On the basis of the decisions adopted during this meeting, which established, inter alia, individually identifiable oil-import ceilings, it has been remarked that the IEA had arrived at a “turning-point”. “After five years of, more or less global, non-binding arrangements, 1980 is the year in which it will have to be shown whether one can indeed arrive at a clear, more obligatory approach to the oil problem”. Whatever future developments there might be, this seems to be a good time to take a closer look at the IEA. The current war between Iraq and Iran, also re-emphasises the vulnerability of Western oil-supplies, and underlines the practical importance of the IEA. This article will deal mainly with some of the remarkable institutional aspects of the Agency, and the International Energy Program (IEP) which it manages. Before this, there will be a discussion of the background of the IEA and a short description of the core of the IEP: the crisis mechanism, and the other objectives. The article will be concluded with some observations on the relationship between the IEA and the European Communities (EC).