IN THE PERMANENT COURT OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

Problems of the treatment of aliens and of human rights loomed large in the Permanent Court of International Justice. In the sphere of human rights, the Court's seminal Advisory Opinion on Jurisdiction of the Court of Danzig early established that the very object of an international agreement may be the adoption of some definite rules creating individual rights and obligations – which in 1928 was, in Lauterpacht's words, ‘in effect a revolutionary pronouncement’. Earlier, in 1923, in its Opinion on Nationality Decrees issued in Tunis and Morocco, the Court had held that the question of whether a certain matter is or is not solely within the jurisdiction of a state ‘is an essentially relative question; it depends upon the development of international relations’. Accordingly, as Professors McDougal, Lasswell and Chen put it: ‘The choice between “international concern” and “domestic jurisdiction” was thus made to depend not only upon fact, but upon changing fact, permitting a continuing readjustment of inclusive and exclusive competences as conditions might require.’ In its Advisory Opinion in the same year on German Settlers in Poland, the Court interpreted ‘civil rights’ as embracing property rights, and it debarred discrimination in fact even if discrimination in form is absent.