Early in 1961, the President of Liberia, the Prime Minister of Nigeria, and the Prime Minister of Sierra Leone decided to act as joint sponsors of a conference of the leaders of all the independent African states for the purpose of promoting inter-African co-operation. Liberia, as the the oldest of the three sponsoring states, graciously offered to play host. The idea was that all the African states that were independent at that time were ipso facto eligible for membership of the conference. This conference would include the small group of independent African states, usually referred to as the Casablanca bloc, consisting of the United Arab Republic, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Morocco. This group had signed the Casablanca Charter which was a brief document setting out the aims and purposes of the organization, among which were schemes of economic and social co-operation and the establishment of an African High Command for the purpose of self-defense of its members as well as for that of ridding the continent of Africa of all forms of colonialism. When, therefore, the decision was taken by the three sponsoring states to call a Pan-African conference, it was envisaged that all the then independent states in Africa, including the so-called Casablanca bloc states, would attend and take a full part in its deliberations.

The possible presence of very large petroleum and natural gas reserves in the area beneath the North Sea is currently the subject of intense investigation. If confirmed, as seems likely in at least some localities, this occurrence will raise legal problems of considerable interest and complexity. For the North Sea is not merely an oilfield covered by water: for centuries it has been one of the world's major fishery regions and the avenue to and from the world's busiest seaports. Thus all three of the present principal uses of the sea—fishing, navigation, and the exploitation of submarine resources—promise to meet for the first time on a large scale in an area where all are of major importance. The process of reconciling the various interests at stake will provide the first thoroughgoing test of the adequacy and acceptability of the general principles laid down in the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf and should add greatly to the practice and precedents available in this developing branch of the law. In the present article an attempt is made to review some of the geographical and economic considerations involved in the North Sea situation, to note some of the technical and legal developments that have already taken place, and to consider these elements in the light of the various interests and legal principles concerned.

In May of 1955 five individuals instituted a legal action against the Japanese Government to recover damages for injuries allegedly sustained as a consequence of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II. On December 7, 1963, the twenty-second anniversary of the surprise attack by Japan upon Pearl Harbor, the District Court of Tokyo delivered its lengthy decision in the case. The decision has been translated into English and reprinted in full in The Japanese Annual of International Law for 1964. This enables an accounting of this singular attempt by a court of law to wrestle with the special legal problems arising from recourse to atomic warfare.

There has, it seems clear, been a change, in quality and in degree, in the general condition of relations between the two main competing social and economic systems, Soviet and Western, since the October, 1962, crisis, which brought us all so close to the edge of nuclear war. The crisis itself, whatever the original motives which induced Premier Khrushchev to venture his offensive, ground-to-ground, nuclear weapons into Cuba, was terminated happily, with an unusual display of reasonableness and self-restraint, and mutual give-and-take, as between the two competing systems. It may be correct to conclude, as Walter Lippmann (echoing President de Gaulle) does, that the peaceful resolution of the October, 1962, crisis marked the “end of the Postwar period.” On this view, the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty of August, 1963, simply ratified and concretized in certain particulars a fundamental accommodation or détente that had already occurred de facto between the two systems; while the more recent achievement of the so-called “Hot Line” system for direct, emergency communication between the Kremlin and the White House and the additional accord on preventing the orbiting of nuclear weapons in space vehicles, for their part, served to confirm and extend the détente in some further practical details.

In the prewar period the principle appeared widely accepted that a new state is not bound by any treaty of its predecessor with the possible exception of a treaty locally connected with its territory. In view of the practice which seems to have changed since then, the appropriateness of this principle as a statement of the general rule is open to question. Some authoritative studies on the practice of several international organizations in relation to state succession indicate a recent tendency to recognize that it is desirable to make provision for the stability and continuity of relationships under general multilateral treaties when new states are formed. A body of the practice of GATT not yet covered by such studies seems to merit special attention mainly for two reasons: first, GATT has developed certain devices whereby both the community interest in maintaining the continuity of multilateral treaty relations and the particular interest of new states in asserting and exercising their freedom as to treaty relations should well be accommodated; and secondly, these devices seem to be susceptible of adoption by other international organizations. The present study seeks to examine how these devices have evolved through the practice of GATT, and attempts an evaluation by pointing out their imperfections as well as notable utility.

International law recognizes that boundaries are fundamental to the bases of national power and therefore projects various prescriptions for their protection as the demarcation lines of territorial integrity and exclusive control. By far the most important principle is that prohibiting the use of coercion in reshaping boundaries. This principle assumes, however, the effective application of other principles or norms for establishing and identifying boundaries. Fundamental general community policies require that states do not employ coercion in the settlement of boundary disputes, but rather make positive efforts to honor reasonable demands and expectations of other states concerning their political independence and territorial sovereignty. Effective implementation of these policies can be achieved only when states refrain from unilateral imposition of territorial claims upon other states and assert their freedom of decision in a way not to interfere with a comparable freedom of others.

The great majority of legal experts in the U.S.S.R. and associate countries, the constitutional order of which is closely patterned on the Soviet model, would fully subscribe to the principle enunciated by one of their Russian colleagues to the effect that:

Commenting on the International Law Commission m the eighth year of its existence, Professor Julius Stone urged the conversion of the Commission

The student of the constitutional development of the United Nations has certainly had no reason so far to complain of a scarcity of serious problems and dangerous crises claiming his attention: from Mr. Khrushchev’s proposal of 1960 to abolish the office of the Secretary General and to replace it by an executive organ consisting of three persons representing the Western Powers, the socialist states and the neutralist countries, to the long drawn-out and, at the time of this writing, still unresolved conflict concerning “certain expenses of the United Nations,” the application of Article 19 of the Charter and “the whole question of peace-keeping operations in all their aspects.” It therefore comes as a pleasant change if, for once, he can address himself to a development of the constitutional law of the Organization which is clearly of a non-revolutionary character and is being brought about by applying the very procedure which is laid down in the Charter for changes of this kind: the increase, by the procedure regulated in Article 108 of the Charter, of the number of nonpermanent Members of the Security Council from six to ten and the increase of the membership of the Economic and Social Council from eighteen to twenty-seven. This was done by amendments to Articles 23, 27 and 61 of the Charter, which were adopted by the General Assembly on December 17, 1963, and which, by August 31, 1965, were ratified by 93 Members, i.e., a number exceeding two-thirds of the Members of the United Nations, including all the permanent Members of the Security Council. The amendments entered into force on August 31, 1965. While the changes thus made in the Charter have not brought about fundamental modifications in the structure of the Organization, they are of considerable political importance. Moreover, they are the first amendments in the text of the San Francisco Charter and, in the words of Secretary of State Rusk, “this is enough by itself to endow the event with considerable significance.”

If the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations, designated as “International Co-operation Year,” had fallen in 1964 rather than 1965, a general assessment of the evolution of international law and organization since the end of World War II would have justified a measure of cautious confidence. Mankind was still very far from having organized itself against the danger of aggression. The danger of the proliferation of nuclear arms remained without effective control, apart from a partial nuclear test ban to which both the United States and the Soviet Union were parties. The world’s largest state, Communist China, remained outside the United Nations and without diplomatic relations with the United States and a large number of other states. The United Nations remained without effective control in conflicts between major Powers. The special agencies of the United Nations and other international welfare organizations still lacked, with few exceptions, the legal and executive power to cope with the many urgent problems of mankind. In the two most vital and dangerous areas: the conservation of resources, and the stemming of the explosive growth in the world's population, international organization was still embryonic or altogether lacking. But these grave drawbacks and deficiencies.