Suchergebnisse

The fourth session of the ICAO Council met in Geneva during the week immediately following the adjournment of the Second Assembly. Action was taken upon arrangements for the financing of air navigation services in Iceland; the Council approved the recommendations and final act of the Conference on Air Navigation Services in Iceland. An agreement to this effect was signed on September 16, the first formal agreement between ICAO and one of the contracting states to provide for financial and technical assistance in the maintenance of facilities for trans-oceanic air navigation. Under the terms of the agreement, the Icelandic government would operate and maintain the needed services and the ICAO Council would pay specified sums received from the contributing states to finance these facilities, would exercise general supervision over the operation and the services and would furnish such advice as might be required for the effective discharge of obligations by Iceland under the agreement. Before adjourning its fourth session, the Council notified the states signatory to the Final Act of the Conference on Air Navigation Services in Iceland of their assessments for expenses in accordance with the decisions of the Conference.

The International Court of Justice handed down its decision in the Colombian-Peruvian asylum case on November 20, 1950. The application had been submitted by Colombia to the Court under article 7 of the Protocol of Friendship and Cooperation between Colombia and Peru, Articles 40 and 36, paragraph 1 of the Statute, and article 32 of the rules of procedure. Colombia submitted two questions for the Court's adjudication: 1) within the limits of the obligations resulting from the Bolivarian Agreement on Extradition of 1911 and the Havana Convention of 1938 in particular, and general American international law, was Colombia competent to qualify unilaterally and definitively the nature of the offense for which diplomatic asylum had been granted, and 2) was Peru, the territorial state, obliged to grant a safe-conduct to Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the refugee who had been granted asylum in the Colombian embassy in Lima. The pertinent facts of the case were: 1) on October 3, 1948 there had been a military rebellion in Peru which had been put down immediately; 2) on October 4, 1948 the Peruvian government charged the American People's Revolutionary Alliance, a political party of which Haya de la Torre was the leader, with attempted rebellion and stated that its leaders would be brought to justice; 3) on October 27, 1948 there was a coup d'etat in Peru and a subsequent decree which prescribed summary procedure in cases of rebellion; and 4) on January 3, 1949 Haya de la Torre sought and was granted asylum in the Colombian embassy.

The appeal of the British government to the dominions for aid in defending the Dardanelles served to call attention once more to one of the most anomalous features of the constitution of the empire, namely the absence of a definite imperial policy in the matter of war and peace. On this most vital of all questions one would naturally expect to find at least some general understanding between the mother country and the dominions as to their respective rights and obligations. But such is not the case. The principles and practice of the constitution are hopelessly at variance.

Since the end of the first World War, a turn in the trade balance of the United States toward an import surplus has been prophesied or advocated repeatedly. According to these prognostications and beliefs, the United States has been moving into the position of an "old creditor nation" and therefore is likely, or will be obliged, to carry a passive trade balance financed by a net inflow of earnings on, or repayments of, capital from abroad.1 Fulfillment of such an obligation has often been regarded as a contribution to domestic welfare and international order.

International law, whether customary or conventional, has been assumed to rest ultimately on moral or non-physical sanctions. In speaking of the "sanctity" of international agreements more often than of the "sanctions" upon which their effectiveness may depend, we have placed ultimate faith in the non-coercive means of giving effect to international law and international obligations. The practice of states, however, shows a striking number of instances in which material self-help sanctions have been exercised in time of peace to give effect to international rights.

Contents: The effect of the debt situation upon Europe's relations with the U.S., by E. M. Patterson; The problems involved in the settlement of international obligations, by N. H. Davis; The effect of the debt settlements on the trade balance of the U.S., by J. W. Angell; The effect on American workers of collecting allied debts, by Matthew Woll; Why the French debt should be cancelled, by J. H. Latane; Friction in international opinion, by C. C. Catt.

Not the least among the many problems of reconstruction facing civilization at the present moment is the establishment upon a secure basis of the principles of international law as a system of world conduct and protection. Of actually restraining principles, indeed, the late war has exhibited few; nor have these, so far as successfully asserted, prevented violations of neutral rights upon a vast scale, together with a similar disregard of privileges heretofore universally conceded to occupied territory; while still more appalling has been the exploitation of diplomatic immunity in the interest of treacherous propaganda, and the wholesale assassination of noncombatants on the high seas. To such action, the words in which Germanicus is represented by Tacitus as addressing his licentious soldiery may well be applied: "Ye have violated even rights accorded to enemies, as also the sanctity of embassy and the consecrated obligations of usage between peoples."

By the common law an alien is a subject of a foreign state who has not been born within the allegiance of the King: he is counted an alien friend if his sovereign or state is at peace, an alien enemy if his sovereign or state is at war with the King. By the Naturalization Act of 1870 an alien may: (1) take, acquire, hold and dispose of real and personal property of every description in the same manner in all respects as a natural-born British subject; (2) after five years' residence in the United Kingdom and on giving proof that he intends to reside in the kingdom or serve under the Crown, obtain a certificate of naturalization by which he becomes entitled to all political and other rights, powers and privileges and subject to all obligations to which a natural-born British subject in the United Kingdom is subject, with the qualification that he may not be deemed a British subject within the limits of the country of his original allegiance, if, according to its laws, he has not ceased to be a subject of that state. (This last provision has been abrogated by the new Nationality Act of 1914, which came into operation in January.)

The preamble of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 between Great Britain (on behalf of Canada) and the United States declares its purpose to be:
To prevent disputes regarding the use of boundary waters and to settle all questions which are now pending between the United States and the Dominion of Canada involving the rights, obligations, or interests of either in relation to the other or to the inhabitantsof the other, along their common frontier, and to make provision for the adjustment and settlement of all such questions as may hereafter arise.

In his instructions to the American delegation to the Second Hague Conference, Secretary of State Root pointed out as the weakness of the present system of arbitration the prevalence of diplomatic ideals instead of purely judicial ideals in practice and procedure, and stated it as his opinion that the creation of a truly permanent international court composed of professional judges, who should act under a sense of judicial as distinguished from diplomatic responsibility, would increase the confidence of nations in arbitration and render the recourse to this method of settling international disputes much more frequent. Secretary Root's statement is so important in itself, the reasoning is so clear and unanswerable, the proposal to establish a permanent international court of justice so cleancut and precise, and the details which he specifies so simple and apparently self-evident, that I shall quote and comment briefly upon this passage in the instructions. "There can be no doubt," he says, "that the principal objection to arbitration rests not upon the unwillingness of nations to submit their controversies to impartial arbitration, but upon an apprehension that the arbitrations to which they submit may not be impartial. It has been a very general practice for arbitrators to act, not as judges deciding questions of fact and law upon the record before them, under a sense of judicial responsibility, but as negotiators effecting settlements of the questions brought before them in accordance with the traditions and usages and subject to all the considerations and influences which affect diplomatic agents. The two methods are radically different, proceed upon different standards of honorable obligation, and frequently lead to widely differing results. It very frequently happens that a nation which would be very willing to submit its differences to an impartial judicial determination is unwilling to subject them to this kind of diplomatic process."