The General Assembly of the United Nations, by its Eesolution 1105 (XI) adopted on February 21, 1957, called for a conference of its members to “examine the law of the sea, taking account not only of the legal but also of the technical, biological, economic and political aspects of the program, and to embody the results of its work in one or more international conventions or such other instruments as it may deem appropriate.”

The United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea met at Geneva, Switzerland, from February 24 to April 27, 1958, with representatives of 86 countries present. The Conference, it will be recalled, was convoked by the Secretary General of the United Nations pursuant to Resolution 1105 (XI) adopted by the General Assembly on February 21, 1957.

The status under international law of the Gulf of Aqaba has come to be a matter of concern not only to the several littoral states, but also to the international community. The basic issue, that of freedom of navigation in this arm of the Red Sea, has been brought into focus as a result of restrictive efforts of several of the coastal states with respect to Israeli shipping, for Arab-Israeli hostility has given political, strategic, commercial and even religious significance to a water area which, until recently, had attracted little attention.

Speaking before the American Society of International Law, Aleksandr Troianovski, the first Soviet Ambassador to the United States, summed up his views on the basic sources of order in international relations. He began by rejecting the idea of a “supernational support” for international law, since the source of the rules regulating the relations among nations “lies in the nations, and not in a superforce acting from above the nations.”

If Americans pause to consider and discuss the legal aspects of the action of the United States in landing Marines at Beirut on July 15, 1958, it is primarily for their own information and intelligence and that of their friends in other countries, and possibly that of people in so-called neutralist countries who may still be open to understanding in this matter.

Elsewhere in this issue the Geneva Conference on the Law of the Sea is fully described, and it is unnecessary here to repeat the facts which have been stated by Mr. Arthur H. Dean and Miss Marjorie M. Whiteman. This comment concerns itself with the methods and procedures which were utilized in what was distinctly an exercise in international law-making.

The Convention on the Continental Shelf, adopted at Geneva on April 26, 1958, by the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, represents the first great effort to determine by an act of international legislation the scope of the continental shelf doctrine in international law. The fact that the Convention was finally approved by a vote of 57 to three, with only eight abstentions, is evidence both that a need for rules on the subject was generally felt and that the rules embodied in the Convention were considered on the whole acceptable.

Once again the attention of students of international law and relations has been directed to the use of propaganda as an offensive weapon of power politics. President Eisenhower, in his historic speech last August before the United Nations, included in his comprehensive plan for the Middle East a proposal for a system of monitoring inflammatory broadcasts.

The approval of the Alaskan statehood bill by the 1958 session of the United States Congress focuses new attention on the increasing penetration of the high northern latitudes. But Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Soviet Union, as well as the United States, have long been active in this frontier region.

The 53rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law will take place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D. C, from April 30 to May 2, 1959.

Readers of the JOurnal are no doubt acquainted with the program that has been carried on for several years, under the leadership of Chief Justice Robert G. Simmons of the Supreme Court of Nebraska, of soliciting surplus law books from lawyers and sending them overseas to Bar Associations, court libraries and law schools.