The eighth session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea met in Geneva from March 19 to April 27, 1979. It resumed in New York from July 16 to August 24, 1979, with the first three days devoted to informal consultations.

After the break-up of western Christendom following the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, a number of historical changes took place in customary international law. One of the most important changes, if not the most important, was the emergence of the nation-state and the political philosophy to which it gave rise, that is to say, the theory of political sovereignty as the cornerstone of the rights and duties of the various states that came into existence. The political sovereignty of states resulted in the gradual replacement of the old international relations within Christendom, which were based upon a theocratic system of law, by a wider legal system that later embraced nations outside Christendom and engendered a universalization of international relations and, therefore, of international law.

There have been many occasions since the inception of the United Nations when it has been found useful to establish nonmilitary areas. A nonmilitary area is one from which all potential combatants, weapons, military equipment, and military installations are excluded and from which no hostile acts or activities in support of or related to the conduct of military operations may be undertaken. In addition to being of historical interest, demilitarization is again being implemented in Sinai and will almost certainly be resorted to in Namibia and other places in the future. Demilitarization thus gives rise to important questions: By whom may such zones be established? What purposes are they intended to serve? What are the implications for state sovereignty? Do such zones have any status for states not parties to the agreements establishing them or for the United Nations and its agencies? And how effective has the supervisory system been?

It began as a very small dispute. Pan American World Airways planned to introduce a service from San Francisco to Paris with a stop in London, using a Boeing 747 aircraft from San Francisco to London and a smaller Boeing 727 aircraft from London to Paris. The change to a smaller plane would have enabled the most efficient and economic use of Pan Am’s fleet. In aviation as in railroad terminology, a change along a route to equipment of a different size is called a “change of gauge.”

A striking feature of our times is that private individuals and corporations are engaging increasingly in activities that may result in significant accidental damage to the transnational environment. The international community has responded to this phenomenon by strengthening the transnational accountability of the private actors. Significant efforts have been made to obtain wide international acceptance of the principle of “equal right of access,” that is, the right of the actual or potential victim of transnational pollution to have recourse, for the purposes of both prevention and compensation, to the national authorities that exercise jurisdiction or control over the private actor concerned. A similar endeavor is discernible towards ensuring, at least in certain cases, that the private actor will maintain minimal financial resources for compensating victims of accidental transnational pollution damage.

Most international organizations lack law-enforcing sanctions or, having them in legal theory, are reluctant to invoke them in practice. Instead, they increasingly resort to fact-finding.

The United States military potential may be viewed in two interlocking dimensions. The first is nuclear deterrence: the maintenance of a posture designed to deter other states with nuclear military potential from nuclear adventures. The second is comprised of nuclear and more conventional capabilities, designed to communicate to the widest spectrum of adversaries a capacity and willingness to exercise coercion in different settings in order to protect vital national interests.

The legal regulation of military objects on the seabed and in general of military uses of the seabed seems to have ceased to attract the attention of the international community since the conclusion in 1971 of the Treaty on the Prohibition of the Emplacement of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction on the Seabed and Ocean Floor (the Seabed Treaty). Attention now seems to be concentrated on other military uses of the sea, especially those concerning the mobility of naval fleets. This shift in focus is particularly noticeable if one considers the work of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.

The negotiations at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea have been the most important catalyst of this century for a new legal and political order for the oceans. The conference, together with its preparatory work within the “Seabeds Committee,” has indelibly stamped ocean perspectives. Even without a widely acceptable, comprehensive treaty the influence of these perspectives on state practice will be profound—indeed, it already has been, for example, in legitimizing 200-mile coastal fisheries jurisdiction. If the conference is able to clear the remaining hurdles, particularly that of deep seabed mining, the new treaty is likely to govern oceans law for the foreseeable future.

“Autonomy” is not a term of art or a concept that has a generally accepted definition in international law. Indeed, one surveying either the literature on the subject or the examples brought forth to demonstrate the existence of the concept is apt to conclude, to paraphrase the late jurist John Chipman Gray, that “on no subject of international law has there been so much loose writing and nebulous speculation as on autonomy.” Yet the term is very much in vogue today. The Camp David framework, for instance, establishing the context for negotiating peace in the Middle East, seeks to provide “full autonomy to the inhabitants” of the West Bank and Gaza. Regional autonomy has been extended recently to the Basque country and Catalonia by Spain, and to the 34 atolls composing the Marshall Islands by the United States. Currently, demands for greater autonomy have been made by the Shetland Islands against Great Britain, as well as by Quebec against Canada. Greek officials have offered to create “a self-administered and inviolable” area within Greece as a permanent site for the Olympic Games. While conventional wisdom accords regional autonomous entities only limited status under international law, the increasing frequency of claims to autonomy and the incremental effect such claims will have upon the international legal order make the concept of autonomy ripe for review.

The exploration and use of the space environment, consisting of outer space per se, the moon, and celestial bodies, may result in harm to persons and to property. International law and municipal law have focused on rules allowing for the payment of money damages for harm caused by space objects and their component parts, including the “payload.” Both forms of law have accepted the basic proposition that money damages should compensate for harm. Principal attention will be given in this analysis to the kinds of harm caused by space objects that are considered to be compensable under international law at the present time.

Since the 19th century, governments have joined to create specialized international organizations to control the effects of new technologies and to regulate increased economic ties between nations. The number of such organizations has increased dramatically since the Second World War, and it is likely that this approach to international problem solving through permanent, specialized agencies will continue. Yet for nations to act effectively in concert, the organization through which they act must command the respect of its members, and they must abide by the organization’s decisions. Moreover, the way in which these decisions are made—the formal procedures and informal practices followed by the organization’s members—will have a direct and immediate effect on the members’ observance of them. Even the generally accepted substantive rules of an organization are not likely to be observed if they are perceived as arbitrarily applied without proper voting safeguards.

During the current political era, which has been marked by the attempts of the two superpowers to abate the economic and political burdens of their intercontinental and other “military build-up” through mutual dialogue (e.g., SALT, MBFR) and to achieve a certain détente in their relationship, a government came to power in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) after the 1969 parliamentary elections, whose declared goal was to make its own German contribution to help bring about a relaxation in international tensions, secure the peace in Central Europe, and make life there more tolerable for its inhabitants. The effort was all the more important because Germany was and is the only place on earth where the United States and the Soviet Union face each other directly. Initially, this political goal, securing the peace by relaxing tensions, was effected by the establishment of an extensive system of international treaties, usually between the Federal Republic of Germany on the one side, and the states of Eastern Europe with Communist governments on the other. Only to the extent that Berlin and the rights of the Allied powers of World War II were affected, were the three Western occupying powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) included in the system of treaties, partly by exchanges of notes and partly directly (e.g., the Berlin Quadripartite Agreement).

The International Court of Justice has examined the seizure and detention of United States diplomats and members of their staff by a group of militant “students” in Tehran from the point of view of international law. But it is also of interest to inquire into the legal status of these acts under Islamic law, which the Islamic Republic of Iran adopted with its Constitution of 1979, and under Islamic international law, which is used here to mean that aspect of the Shari’a and its practice by Islamic countries toward other countries.

Many vexing, complicated, and important problems of international law relate in some way to reservations to multilateral treaties. No doubt, the right of states to make reservations to multilateral treaties is important to the functioning of an international legal system, a major component of which is multilateral treaties. As Edwin Hoyt pointed out two decades ago, the unanimity rule has given way to a much more flexible standard which permits reservations under many circumstances. Thus, the position adopted here is that many important questions should be asked about when and how reservations are used and what their aggregate impact has been. This approach contrasts with most others which concentrate on the legality of reservations. Reservations to multilateral treaties are a fact of life that can be evaluated and analyzed.

This case, instituted by the United States on November 29, 1979, by means of a unilateral Application under Article 40 of the Statute of the Court and Article 38 of the Rules of Court, relates to the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran and the American Consulates in Tabriz and Shiraz and the detention as hostages of some 50 Americans by so-called militants. According to one doctrine of the justiciability of disputes, it would be difficult to imagine a more tension-laden and therefore non-justiciable dispute, considering that, as contended by the United States both in the Application and the Request of November 29, 1979, for the indication of provisional measures under Article 41 of the Court’s Statute and Articles 73 and 74 of the Rules of Court, the Iranian Government was involved in the takeover and continues to be involved in the detention of the hostages. The circumstances, which in the view of the United States required the indication of provisional measures, were summarized by the Court in paragraph 34 of its Order of December 15, 1979, as follows:

1. (i) On 4 November 1979, in the course of a demonstration outside the United States Embassy compound in Tehran, demonstrators attacked the Embassy premises; no Iranian security forces intervened or were sent to relieve the situation, despite repeated calls for help from the Embassy to the Iranian authorities. Ultimately the whole of the Embassy premises was invaded. The Embassy personnel, including consular and non-American staff, and visitors who were present in the Embassy at the time were seized. Shortly afterwards, according to the United States Government, its consulates in Tabriz and Shiraz, which had been attacked earlier in 1979, were also seized, without any action being taken to prevent it;

2. (ii) Since that time, the premises of the United States Embassy in Tehran, and of the consulates in Tabriz and Shiraz, have remained in the hands of the persons who seized them. These persons have ransacked the archives and documents both of the diplomatic mission and of its consular section. The Embassy personnel and other persons seized at the time of the attack have been held hostage with the exception of 13 persons released on 18 and 20 November 1979. Those holding the hostages have refused to release them, save on condition of the fulfilment by the United States of various demands regarded by it as unacceptable. The hostages are stated to have frequently been bound, blindfolded, and subjected to severe discomfort, complete isolation and threats that they would be put on trial or even put to death. The United States Government affirms that it has reason to believe that some of them may have been transferred to other places of confinement;

3. (iii) The Government of the United States considers that not merely has the Iranian Government failed to prevent the events described above, but also that there is clear evidence of its complicity in, and approval of, those events;

4. (iv) The persons held hostage in the premises of the United States Embassy in Tehran include, according to the information furnished to the Court by the Agent of the United States, at least 28 persons having the status, duly recognized by the Government of Iran, of “member of the diplomatic staff” within the meaning of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961; at least 20 persons having the status, similarly recognized, of “members of the administrative and technical staff’ within the meaning of that Convention; and two other persons of United States nationality not possessing either diplomatic or consular status. Of the persons with the status of member of the diplomatic staff, four are members of the Consular Section of the Embassy;

5. (v) In addition to the persons held hostage in the premises of the Tehran Embassy, the United States Charge d’Affaires in Iran and two other United States diplomatic agents are detained in the premises of the Iranian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, in circumstances which the Government of the United States has not been able to make entirely clear, but which apparently involve restriction of their freedom of movement, and a threat to their inviolability as diplomats.