Ten years ago, on April 6th, 1945, Benjamin Marius Telders died in the concentration-camp at Bergen-Belsen. With him the Netherlands lost not only an outstanding international lawyer but also one of its greatest sons.

The son of a well known legal family, Telders grew up in the Hague. Already, while still a student at the University of Leyden, he was fascinated by international law and an essay, written when he was twenty, on Robert Cecil's Treaty of Guaranty1 won an award from the Marburg Fund. At the end of his studies in the Faculty of Law he defended his thesis “Staat en Volkenrecht” (The State and the Law of Nations)2, in which he sought to rehabilitate Hegels legal philosophy. He attempted to show that the German philosopher was far from having been the grave digger of international law that he had hitherto been represented as being. When reading this book it is difficult to decide which is the more to be admired: the clarity of the exposition or the maturity of the legal thought.

Après une période préparatoire au cours de laquelle la nouvelle Cour Internationale de Justice a arrêté son règlement de procédure en date du 16 mai 1946, elle a maintenant rendu la justice pendant sept années. Il est difficile d'indiquer exactement combien de procédures elle a traitées dans cette période. Quatre affaires portées devant elle ont été rayées de son rôle après quelques actes introductifs de procédure; d'autres ont été échelonnées sur des phases procédurales successives et, par conséquent, sur des procédures séparées; dans d'autres encore, la procédure proprement dite a été précédée d'un prélude, ou suivie d'une finale à la suite de jugements interlocutoires de nature divergente.

In 1947 there came before the Court of Appeals of Amsterdam a case concerning a claim by a resident of the Netherlands against a Hungarian Bank, which claim was based on a contract governed by the law of the State of New York. One of the questions to be decided by the Court was whether the fact that Hungarian exchange control regulations prohibited the Bank from effecting that payment to a non-resident would necessitate the rejection of the plaintiff's claim.

It would be a remarkable and astonishing thing: to find a generally acceptable definition of aggression. We know that all endeavours up till now failed completely, including the labours of the Special Committee on defining aggression, that met in New York last year.

When we look at its report, we see in the Annexes draft-definitions of aggression and suggestions as to definitions. In view of this the French member of the Committee at the time stated that, in his opinion, the Committee had carried out its terms of reference, viz. “to submit draft definitions of aggression or draft statements of the notion of aggression”. I would submit that the Special Committee did not carry out its functions in this regard. In the Annexes of the Report drafts are given proposed by individual members of the Committee. Those drafts were not drafts of the Committee, but drafts of some of its members.