Until lately, the procedure of third-party intervention before the International Court of Justice provided for by Articles 62 and 63 of the Statute of the Court had been underutilized; as a result, there was scant judicial authority and comparatively little academic discussion on its use and limitations. This situation has now dramatically changed, as three recent cases before the Court have involved claims of third-party intervention: that between Tunisia and Libya, where Malta made the request to intervene; that between Libya and Malta, where Italy was the requesting state; and, most recently, the case between Nicaragua and the United States, where El Salvador made a declaration of intervention.

The entire burden of caring for millions of refugees has until now been assumed by the uprooted refugees themselves, their countries of asylum, their countries of resettlement and donors, whether directly or through international organizations. Overlooked are the responsibilities of the countries of origin both toward their own citizens now turned refugees and toward the countries of asylum saddled with the burden of caring for those refugees. This paper focuses on the responsibilities of the source countries under international law to compensate refugees and countries of asylum. It is hoped that clarification and fulfillment of these responsibilities will contribute not only to the well-being of refugees and the alleviation of the burdens on their hosts, but also to the reduction or eradication of the very phenomenon of “refugees.”

In a recent article entitled The Secret War in Central America and the Future of World Order, Professor John Norton Moore, a staunch defender of United States actions toward Nicaragua, sets forth a comprehensive array of factual assertions and legal arguments to support his conclusions that support by the United States of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries or “contras” and its own actions against Nicaragua are justified as collective self-defense under international law. He also presents arguments to support his conclusion that the International Court of Justice has so exceeded its authority in exercising jurisdiction in the case of Nicaragua v. United States that its decisions are void, and consequently may be ignored by the United States—or, for that matter, Nicaragua. Professor Moore’s analysis and conclusions differ sharply from those of the present writer. It should therefore be useful to identify the main points of disagreement, and to suggest the policy implications of the different legal arguments and conclusions.

The clashes in the Gulf of Sidra (off the coast of Libya) between the navies of the United States and Libya in the last week of March 1986 have brought to the fore once again some legal problems surrounding the Libyan claims regarding the juridical status of the body of water in question.