Suchergebnisse

States have engaged in an intensive process of multilateral treaty making since World War Two despite the fact that few multilateral treaties have fully solved the problems they were designed to address. This inter-disciplinary study of multilateral treaties offers a balanced assessment of the function of multilateral treaties in world politics that draws out the political, as distinct from the legal, meaning of a treaty text. The treaty establishing a regime is regarded as an agreement to set some negotiated limits on pursuit of a common foreign policy goal so that full-blown pursuit of that goal will not bring the States into conflict nor jeopardize any State's pursuit of that goal. States are then able to continue pursuing that goal with, if anything, renewed vigour, albeit within the agreed limits. Theorising the relationship between a treaty text and its political context establishes a basis on which to critically reconceptualize regime effectiveness and on which to develop 'treaty strategy' for use by political actors, including international lawyers

Examines the basis for Australia's objections to resumption of Japanese whaling during the US occupation, its diplomatic efforts, and reaction from the US. Finds that arguments based on breach of international law led to reevaluation of policy, while those couched in economic or practical terms did not produce any effect.

Recent cases before the High Court of Australia have raised the question as to the appropriate degree to which international law should influence Australian law and politics.1Crucial to the reasoning in the leading judgment of the landmark 1992Mabocase,2by which the Australian judiciary recognised for the first time a native title to land, was the finding that Australia had not beenterra nulliusat the time of colonisation. The leading judgment accepted the categorisation of Australia as a settled colony which had been established by the Privy Council inCooperv.Stuart.3In this judgment Lord Watson had held that Australia, as a "settled" colony, had received transplanted British law "except where explicitly changed or considered irrelevant".4This had given rise to the assumption, confirmed byMilurrpumv.Nabalco Ltd(the Gove Land Rights case of 1971) that, since no legal rights to land of indigenous people existed in British law and none had been explicitly acknowledged in relation to Australia, no basis existed for their later recognition.5The leading judgment inMabowent on to declare, however, that the notion that British law had been transplanted into a settled colony had been based on the assumption that the "indigenous people of a settled colony were … without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organisation".6Since "the facts as we know them today" do not "fit this theory" the leading judgment asserted there to be "no warrant for applying in these times rules of the English common law which were a product of that theory".7