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Comment and correspondence: 161-3 Ag, 252-3 S '60.

The tenth session of the General Assembly will be faced with the question of convoking a general review conference under Article 109 (3) of the Charter. The conference, if convened, will work under numerous limitations, some of them of a procedural nature, others of a substantive nature. In addition to these objective factors affecting the work of a general conference the attitudes of governments cannot be ignored.

Contents: The amendment provisions of the charter; The United Nations today; The present status of the charter; The attitudes of governments.

International law was no more prepared for the dynamics of the present war than was the Maginot school of military strategy. International lawyers had given little serious thought to the legal problems which total war would bring. Consequently, while international arrangements were concluded on special questions (e.g. on aerial warfare), the main body of the 1907 Hague Convention, including the section dealing with military occupation,remained unchanged. Military occupation was still conceived of as a temporary phenomenon with limited objectives. But totalitarian warfare as waged by the Axis powers has had unlimited objectives, aimed at nothing less than the complete political and economic subjugation of the occupied territory. In practice the enemy has recognized no restraints of either law or custom save the threat of immediate retaliation. Far from "respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country," as the Hague regulations require, the Axis has systematically destroyed the political and legal order in the occupied territories. It has substituted quislings in the place of duly constituted local authorities, and has employed them for economic as well as political ends.