The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission (Commission or FCSC) was granted jurisdiction to determine the validity and amounts of certain claims by U.S. nationals against Iran by the Iran Claims Act and the 1990 Settlement Agreement (lump sum settlement) between the United States and Iran. The Iran Claims Act, a 1985 statute enacted in anticipation of the lump sum agreement settling U.S. “small claims” against Iran, required the Commission to apply:

1. (1) the terms of any settlement agreement [lump sum settlement];

2. (2) the relevant provisions of the Declarations of the Government of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria of January 19, 1981, giving consideration to interpretations thereof by the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal; and

3. (3) applicable principles of international law, justice, and equity.

After six years of study by its Committee on the Enforcement of Human Rights Law, the sixty-fourth Conference of the International Law Association, held in Queensland, Australia, from August 19 to 25, 1990, approved by consensus a set of standards to assist human rights bodies in monitoring states of emergency. These standards, designated the Queensland Guidelines for Bodies Monitoring Respect for Human Rights during States of Emergency, complement on the enforcement side the substantive norms found in the Paris Minimum Standards of Human Rights Norms in a State of Emergency, adopted by the ILA in 1984.

The unanimous judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the Soering case, handed down on July 7, 1989, holds that Great Britain’s extradition of the applicant to the United States to stand trial for capital murder, an offense punishable under the applicable Virginia law by “death, or imprisonment for life,” would violate the prohibition against “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” in the European Convention on Human Rights. Aside from its effect on the future ability of the United States (and many other countries) to obtain the extradition from Council of Europe countries of persons charged with offenses carrying the death penalty, the judgment in Soering has implications of a far wider nature for international criminal law, the law of state responsibility, the jurisprudence of the European Convention, and international human rights law in general. Some of these implications are obvious and immediate; others are more speculative and long range. Like the proverbial pebble thrown in the pond, Soering will cause ripples for some time to come.

A decade ago Professor Henkin remarked that “there has been almost no examination at all of the relation between international human rights and the American Constitutional version of human rights.” Since then he has done much to fill this gap in the literature, as has, more recently, a distinguished barrister/scholar from Great Britain. Nevertheless, it may be useful, in this symposium celebrating the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, to survey both the contribution it has made to the development of international human rights law and the extent to which the latter has influenced the evolution of U.S. constitutional law.

Since there exists no international judicial system to adjudicate international claims in the ordinary course of events, individuals and business enterprises with grievances against a foreign country have looked, both jointly and severally, either to the “espousal” of their claims by their government—a discretionary act guaranteeing no ultimate redress—or, assuming their government has been able to negotiate a compromis with the foreign country involved, to the adjudication of their claims by an ad hoc international tribunal, almost always one without funds from which to pay awards once rendered. However, the volume and complexity of the claims spawned by World War II, the arrival of Marxist governments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and the emergence of an economically restless Third World have rendered the espousal process increasingly less effective; and efforts to establish ad hoc international tribunals have been almost uniformly unproductive during the past four decades (the Algerian Accords establishing the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal being the rare exception that proves the general proposition).

While many law schools now offer separate courses or seminars on international human rights law, the number of students exposed to such specialized study remains relatively small. Human rights law is relevant to many other segments of the law school curriculum—in particular, to courses on constitutional law and individual rights—although little scholarly attention has been devoted to date to integrating appropriate human rights issues into the “bread and butter” courses that all law students take. To begin to address this lacuna, the Procedural Aspects of International Law (PAIL) Institute has undertaken to develop a human rights component or module designed to supplement leading constitutional law course books and present methods of teaching constitutional law.