The purpose of this article is to suggest new ways to make international law for the environment. The existing methods are slow, cumbersome, expensive, uncoordinated and uncertain. Something better must be found if the environmental challenges the world faces are to be dealt with successfully. Nearly twenty years after the Stockholm Declaration, we still lack the institutional and legal mechanisms to deal effectively with transboundary and biospheric environmental degradation. The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development presents an opportunity to make progress. Unfortunately, my reading of the situation in late 1991 suggests that there is no political will to take decisions that will give us the tools to do the job.

This analysis of covert operations, as conducted by Western intelligence services, explores the problem of assessing their effects on international order and comity. Despite a tendency of commentators to overlook this form of intervention, the topic is important; in contemporary global relations, covert acts of hostility between nations occur with a high rate of frequency.

The study is organized into three sections. The first presents a “ladder of escalation” for covert operations, one based on a rising level of intrusion abroad as policy makers climb upward from low-risk to high-risk activities. The second section briefly surveys leading ethical, philosophical and practical issues involved in trying to evaluate the effects of secret intelligence activities. And the third section offers a set of guidelines for evaluating the propriety of proposed covert operations.

The degree to which an international treaty is “directly applied” or “self-executing” in a national (municipal) legal system, i.e., to what extent the treaty norms are treated directly as norms of domestic law (“statutelike law”) without a further “act of transformation,” has been debated in an extensive literature for more than a century. This subject is now receiving increased recognition as part of a broader trend acknowledging that understanding an international legal system necessitates understanding the relationship of national legal and political systems to that international system. In connection with treaties, the basic concepts of “monism” and “dualism” have long been used to explain some of the relationships of treaty law to domestic law.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.

In June 1991, the Antarctic Treaty states, meeting in Madrid, Spain, approved the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (the Madrid Protocol). The Protocol was adopted by the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties and opened for signature on October 4, 1991. Negotiated over a three-year period, the Protocol, together with its annexes, is the most comprehensive multilateral document ever adopted on the international protection of the environment. It promises to be a significant blueprint for preserving the Antarctic. An ironic feature of the Protocol is that, while it bans mining in Antarctica, it had its origins in the 1988 Convention for the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA), which permitted mining.