It is a great pleasure and honour for us to present to Professor Nathan Feinberg on his 80th birthday, as a token of admiration and affection, this issue of the Israel Law Review, which marks the conclusion of the first ten years of publication.

As teachers and students of the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University, we are grateful to him for the leading role he played in the creation of that Faculty. As jurists we admire his undisputed mastery of international law, and as Jews and Israelis we are indebted to him for the service he has rendered to the entire Jewish people, to the Zionist cause and to the State of Israel.

Nathan Feinberg was born in Kovno on June 6, 1895. His aptitude for learning was such that the severe numerus clausus did not prevent his admission to the Russian high school, from which he graduated with distinction in 1914. At the same time he was given a Jewish and Hebrew education privately. He then proceeded to the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1918.

This paper is devoted in the main to one aspect of the problem of reciprocity in matters of extradition focusing attention on its impact on the admissibility of a request for extradition when Israel is the requested state and the person sought is an Israeli national.

The State of Israel has entered into bilateral extradition treaties with eight states and through the multilateral European Convention on Extradition with thirteen other states.

A. Three categories of agreements: These agreements may be grouped into three categories according to their treatment of offenders who are nationals of the requested state.

(1) There are in the first place those agreements which contain no reference to or limitations upon the extradition of the parties' nationals, namely, the agreements with the United Kingdom, Swaziland and Canada.

It may be asserted that freedom of navigation is the cornerstone of international intercourse. It has always been indispensable for shipping, but at the same time, in the past, it did not give rise to any significant conflict of interests. No wonder that freedom of navigation has been universally recognized as a basic norm of international law. Indeed, it is often cited as the most classic illustration of a peremptory norm of the law of nations.

Freedom of navigation could not be confined to the high seas. It was soon realized that to ensure free access to and from the open sea, as well as free passage between its various parts, rights of navigation in several sea spaces other than the open sea should be recognized too. Consequently the ships of all nations are also entitled to enjoy certain rights of navigation in some areas which are subject to the sovereignty of the coastal State, particularly in international straits, even though they may form part of the territorial sea of the riparians. Whereas freedom of navigation on the high seas has long been taken for granted, these limited rights of passage have been the subject of friction and compromises between the users and the littoral State.

One of the central, and most controversial, issues of historic international law concerns the distinction between the territorial sea, over which the sovereignty of the coastal State extends (and by implication also its legal system), and the high seas which are subject to the doctrine of the freedom of the seas. Involved in that controversy is first and foremost the very idea of a division of the waters of the sea into two distinct juridical institutes. In the present century alone this question has been unsuccessfully tackled by a whole series of major international conferences on the law of the sea, held in 1930 under the auspices of the League of Nations, and in 1958, 1960 and 1973–75 under the auspices of the United Nations—this latter conference being still in progress at the time of writing.

The following observations exclude from their scope two questions that are customarily brought into the discussion whenever the problem of self-determination is analyzed, namely:

1) Is self-determination to be equated necessarily with independence or are there any other conceivable models of self-determination?

2) What is a “people” for the purpose of exercising this right and where is the borderline to be drawn between peoples entitled to invoke this right and other entities not so entitled?

It is suggested that for the purposes of these brief observations it be assumed that self-determination is indeed to be equated with political independence and that there exists a way of establishing what group of persons qualifies for the term “people” and which entities do not.

It is not always easy to decide when we must turn to English law. And once it has been determined that reference to English law is appropriate, there is the further question of the substance and application of principles drawn from English law. In such case, English law forms part of the local law, and need not be ascertained as required by the rules of private international law in respect of foreign law.

This makes the local law directly dependent upon English case-law, which itself is constantly being renewed and developed. Such dependence may seem to impair the independence of the Israeli legal system. The question could not, of course, be raised during the Mandatory period at a time when there existed a possibility of appeal from the Mandatory Supreme Court to the Privy Council in Westminster. But after the establishment of the State Cheshin J. said: