Suchergebnisse

To that small band of faithful followers who are devoted to the unification of private international law, October 9 is a day to be commemorated with fetes and galas replete with jest and jollity. On that splendid day in 1986, the Senate of the United States by a vote of 98-0 gave its advice and consent to the ratification of four private law treaties:
the 1980 International Sales Convention;the 1980 International Child Abduction Convention;the 1975 Inter-American Convention on International Commercial Arbitration; andthe 1975 Inter-American Convention on Letters Rogatory with Additional Protocol.

The International Law Commission celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of its first session on May 27, 1974—a little behind the historical course of events, for the first session had actually opened on April 12, 1949. As was to be expected, the occasion called forth almost a floodtide of oratory recounting the achievements of the Commission in the codification of international law.

At its Twenty-Fifth Session the International Law Commission determined to allot some of its limited time to each of the active subjects on its agenda. The decision was the child of necessity. The Draft Articles on the Representation of States in Their Relations with International Organizations had taken up most of the Commissions sessions in 1969, 1970, and 1971, and the Twenty-Fourth Session in 1972 had, under forced draft, produced the draft articles on the Succession of States to Treaties and on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Diplomatic Agents and Other Internationally Protected Persons. The inevitable byproduct was a mounting pressure, both within the Commission and from the General Assembly, for intensive examination of the draft articles and commentaries on State Responsibility, Succession of States in Matters Other Than Treaties, the Most-Favored-Nation Clause, and the Report on Treaties Concluded Between States and International Organizations.

The agenda that faced the International Law Commission at the first meeting of the 24th session on May 2, 1972, was a formidable one. The 23rd session in 1971, despite an extension to fourteen weeks in place of the usual ten, had been able to complete work on the draft articles on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations only by concentrating on that subject to the substantial exclusion of other topics. As a consequence the Commission had not made any real progress on the other active subjects before it, which included State Succession in respect of treaties and in respect of matters other than treaties, as divide between two Special Rapporteurs, State Responsibility, the Most-Favoured-Nation Clause, and Treaty Law of International Organizations. In addition, the Commission had before it another piece of unfinished business, the review of its longterm program of work in light of the wide-ranging and thoughtful "Survey of International Law" which had been prepared in 1971 by the U.N. Secretariat at the Commission request.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the product of two lengthy sessions of the hundred-and-ten-nation conference held in 1968 and 1969 and of preparatory work extending over fifteen years by the International Law Commission, is the first essential element of infrastructure that has been worked out in the enormous task of codifying international law pursuant to Article 13 of the United Nations Charter. The previous codification treaties, the four conventions on the Law of the Sea, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, did not, despite their intrinsic importance, grapple with the fundamentals of constructing a world legal order.