The East-West detente has uncovered the importance of statehood for the international protection of peoples in international conflicts. The importance becomes obvious from a comparison between the legal position of the Kuwaitis with that of the Kurds and, more in particular, the Palestinians in that respect. The Gulf war urged the Security Council to enforce Iraq's compliance with the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. The Council has also taken the position that Israel should apply this convention de jure in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories, albeit lessforcefully. This is partly due to the fact that the UN itself has caused confusion concerning the legal status of these territories. History shows that the Palestine Mandate should not be considered as indivisible in such a way that the creation of Israel automatically implied the termination of the mandate as a whole. The Palestine Mandate still exists for the area of the Arab state, defined in the General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of November 29,1947, recommending a partition plan for Palestine. Subsequent resolutions of both the General Assembly and the Security Council imply that the Palestinian people can only claim the West Bank including East Jerusalem -hereafter referred to as the West Bank- and the Gaza Strip as its future territory. The Palestinian people appears to have resigned itself to this fact of life since its acceptance of Security Council Resolutions 242 of November 22,1947, and 338 of October 22,1973. In doing so it has stopped any further erosion of its claim to an independent state by virtue of its right to self-determination. Neither the Gulf war nor an international peace conference on the Middle East can alter the new situation one bit anymore. For the first time since 1947 the General Assembly is now in the position to keep the promise of self-determination towards the Palestinian people as well. The 1950 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the international status of South West Africa gives it a good point of departure for assuming its full responsibility for doing justice to the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. Legally speaking the role of the UN in the development of the International Peace Conference on the Middle East is crucial for the future of Israel and Palestine.

On October 4,1991 the parties to the Antarctic Treaty adopted the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. This Protocol contains a prohibition for the duration of fifty years of all exploration and exploitation of mineral resources in the Antarctic. The Wellington Convention, which was adopted in 1988 and was intended toregulate the exploitation of minerals,can now be considered dead and buried. Apart from the prohibition on minerals activities, the Protocol sets out a number of rules and regulations to control the activities in Antarctica in a more stringent way than before. This article analyses the Protocol and compares the ‘severeness’ of the rules with the degree of control in the Wellington Convention. It seems likely that states are less willing to accept heavy bureaucratic measures if the road to minerals development is cut off. For issues like dispute settlement, environmental impact assessment, the creation of new institutions and liability, the articles in the Protocol are compared with the corresponding articles of the Minerals Convention. Furthermore this article contains some suggestions on how the current plans to protect the Antarctic environment can be improved.

The EEC Treaty contains no specific provisions for the control of concentrations. Only the competition rules. Articles 85 and 86 EEC, could be considered as possible legal instruments for regulating concentrations. The Commission has had to examine whether and to what extent these provisions could be used to this end.

The Commission's view has been that Article 85 does not apply to operations resulting in structural change, as is the case of concentrations and concentrative joint ventures. Cooperative operations, such as cooperative joint ventures, on the other hand fall to be assessed under Article 85. The Philip Morris case has made this position uncertain. According to the extensive interpretation of this judgement Article 85 is now applicable to certain concentrations and thus to concentrative joint ventures.

There is no such uncertainty regarding the role of Article 86 in controlling concentrative joint ventures, for the Court has established in the Continental Can case that concentrations can be caught by Article 86.

With the adoption in 1989 of the Regulation on concentration control the Commission finally has a legal instrument specifically designed to regulate concentrations. However, only concentrations and concentrative joint ventures which comply with certain turnover thresholds (the so-called concentrations or concentrative joint ventures with a Community dimension) can be assessed by the Commission under the Regulation. This means that the provisions of the Regulation can not be applied to concentrative joint ventures beneath the threshold.

Because of the difficulty in distinguishing concentrative operations from cooperative ones, the Commission published the Notice regarding the concentrative and cooperative operations under the Regulation on the control of concentrations.

Next year, the ‘discovery’ of America by Columbus, 500 years ago, will be commemorated. The discovery of America started a time of colonization for the original inhabitants, the Indians. Since the 1970s an Indian movement has emerged in North America demanding the Indians' ‘rightful place among the family of nations’. This article contains a survey of the current international legal position of Indians in North America. Wiemers holds that international legal principles, developed in the decolonization context, are applicable to the North American Indian population. The right of a people to selfdetermination is the most discussed one.

From the very beginning peaceful settlement of disputes has been on the agenda of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Principle V of the first chapter of the Final Act of Helsinki of 1975 (the so-called first basket) reaffirmed the obligation of the participating states to settle their disputes by peaceful means. The Final Act, however, does not provide a mechanism through which such disputes can be resolved. The Swiss delegation had submitted in 1973 a draft-convention (called the Bindschedler-proposal after its auctor intellectualis Rudolf Bindschedler, the Legal Advisor of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs), containing a detailed system of compulsory dispute settlement. A distinction was made between judiciable and non-judiciable disputes. Judiciable disputes would be submitted to a permanent Arbitral Tribunal, non-judiciable disputes to a permanent Commission of Inquiry, Mediation and Conciliation. This proposal was, however, unacceptable to the East European states (with the exception of Romania) which had always rejected the idea of compulsory third-party dispute settlement, whereas the greaterpart of the Western states, although in principle favourable to a system of compulsory dispute settlement, had serious objections against the substance of the Swiss proposal, inter alia with regard to the rather artificial distinction between judiciable and non-judiciable disputes. The Swiss delegation did not insist on its proposal and went along with a clause in the Final Act which provided for a follow-up meeting of experts with the task “to pursue the examination and elaboration of a generally acceptable method for the peaceful settlement of disputes aimed at complementing existing methods”. It was decided that this meeting of experts was to be convened by Switzerland afterthe first follow-up meeting which was planned for 1977 in Belgrade.

In a previous contribution on the protection of human rights in Europe, I discussed some developments taking place in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Despite the major changes that have occurred in the CSCE during the last year, I would like to address the matter this time from quite a different perspective.2 This short note will focus on the importance of human rights in the legal order of the European Communities – cynical as it may seem to address this rather ‘sophisticated’ issue at a time that in the Yugoslavian civil war human rights are violated with a harshness that has been unknown to Europe for decades.

On September 23,1991, an agreement was signed by the Commission of the European Communities and the United States government to promote cooperation and coordination of theircompetition law enforcement efforts. This is the fourth such bilateral agreement to which the United States is a party, and the first for the Commission. Previous US agreements are in force with Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Australia.

Few periods in world history have been so crucial regarding the organization of international life as the last year (August 1990 - September 1991). The President of the now only leading superpower may have been too hasty and may have used too loose language when referring to a ‘new world order’, at the initial stages of the Iraq crisis. But the changes that took place since, in global politics and distribution of power are profound and far-reaching and may affect the legal structure of mankind.

April 9, 1O, and 11 the Fifteenth Telders International Law Moot Court Competition will take place. For this Anniversary twelve European countries will be sending teams to the Peace Palace in The Hague. The case put before the teams this year, entitled ‘the Case of the Expropriated Toxin Business’, combines topics of general international law such as arbitration and state responsibility with legal problems concerning transnational corporations. Furthermore, production of toxin materials, investment and expropriation are important aspects of the case. The case involves three countries and an international group of companies (a transnational corporation or TNC) which has been engaged in unlawful activities.