The UN General Assembly has recently decided to delete from the agenda of the International Law Commission the topic ‘Relations between States and International Organizations’.

Over a period of 31 years, fourteen Reports by two successive Special Rapporteurs studied the topic in two parts. The First part of the topic (1963–1975) dealt with the privileges and immunities of representatives of states to international organizations, and resulted in a Convention, that has, however, not yet entered into force; the Second part of the topic (1976–1992) concentrated on the legal status and immunities of organizations themselves.

The author analyzes the Draft Articles that have been submitted in the course of the ILC's study of the Second part. This is done by way of a three-step application of the functional necessity concept of organizational immunities:

(1) Status, dealing with an organization's functions, legal personality and capacity-(2) Selection, defining a scale of organizational immunities for which an organization may be eligible - and (3) Scope, determining the extent of selected immunities. Finally, the author employs the two statutory functions of the ILC -the codification of international law and the progressive development of international law- to assess the contribution by the ILC to this field of international institutional law.

Article 62 remained a deadletter for almost seventyyears. The Chamber constituted to settle the frontier dispute between El Salvador and Honduras has changed this picture, and has allowed Nicaragua to intervene with respect to the legal régime of the GulfofFonseca. But it only accorded a non-party status to Nicaragua. However, the full Court had refused permission to intervene in two earlier cases with arguments that were based on the premiss of a party status for the intervening State. Only a future decision on a request for permission to intervene can tell whether the full Court will endorse the stances taken by the Chamber.

Taking the United Nations, its specialized agencies and the EC as a focal point, this article looks at the fiscal position of international organizations and their officials vis-à-vis their host state. Firstly, the fiscal privileges are examined from a theoretical point of view, after which a number of cases are analyzed in which international organizations and their host state differed in their views on the application of the aforementioned privileges.

From a broader perspective, this study explores the watercourse of standards which have sprung on the international level down to their application in daily life. A particular type of provision -concerning the fiscal immunities of an international organization and its officialscontained in a particular type of multilateral convention, dealing with the status, privileges and immunities of international organizations and their officials, is followed down to its application on the national level.

The extraterritorial application of competition law on the basis of the effects doctrine of jurisdiction has long been controversial. An analysis of the assumptions which underlie the discourse of jurisdictional assertion leads, however, to the conclusion that the effects doctrine is the only principle on which competition law jurisdiction can reasonably be based.

Moreover, a form of qualified effects principle, founded upon the consent of the undertakings involved, would be supported by most, if not all, of the leading players in the competition law arena.

[…] risks and conflicts of interest can be overcome by rules of conduct adequate to the challenges of life if a conscious effort is made to foresee and counter the problems likely to emmerge.

Until recently, the Permanent Court of Arbitration has been an institution that one reads about, if at all, principally in the background sections of international law casebooks. This article suggests, and indeed this issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law confirms, that the level of scholarly attention to the Court is changing due to recent developments in the work of the PCA. The purpose of this article is to report and reflect on an emerging effort in the international community to restore the PCA to a prominent place in international arbitration. This article describes the impetus for this effort and the actions taken to reestablish the PCA, as well as the challenges that lie ahead in that effort.

Is the concept of humanitarian intervention part and parcel of customary law? In order to answer this question the or gins of the concept, (alleged) pre- and post-Charter state practice and the relation with the principles of non-interference in the domestic jurisdiction and the non-use of force will be considered. It will be concluded that the aforementioned question must be answered in the negative, notwithstanding the fact that genuine humanitarian interventions tend to be tolerated by the international community.

Air crashes usually attract a lot of attention. One of the reasons lies in the fact that, if an accident occurs, the damage is substantial. This damage may involve loss of life, bodily injury, mental distress and material damage.

The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was attended by 27 states, the Conference of 1907 by 43, the overwhelming majority being from Europe and America. Among the participants were four from Asia: China, Japan, Persia and Siam. Their delegates, trained in the best European legal and diplomatic traditions, were assisted by European experts in explaining their positions on ‘projects’ (or drafts) of European or American origin.

“Todays prison seems to be more of a hotel than a real prison”, and “jailbirds live better lives than normal people do”, are phrases which you can hear quite often. The visit of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (hereafter CPT or the Committee) showed that this is certainly not true for British prisons. This Committee visited the United Kingdom from July 29 to August 10,1990 and drew an extensive report on its findings, to which the British Government reacted.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in his perceptive Introduction to this second Special Issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law notes that the occasion of this publication provides an opportunity for “reflections on international dispute settlement”. I respond to this opportunity by offering ten personal reflections based on experiences gained from participating for some years in the arbitral process as a lawyer, as a co-draftsman of a number of arbitration rules and laws, and, for the last decade, as an arbitrator on an international tribunal.

The institutionalization of international conflict-resolution on a third-party basis, with the creation of a Permanent Court of Arbitration, was one of the high hopes of the political leaders at the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899. In the early phase, from creation of the Court in 1902 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, 17 cases were initiated before the Court. There was a quite understandable gap, through the War years, until 1921; and then, in the decade until 1931,7 further cases were brought before the Court. This was followed by another awkward hiatus as to cases throughout the 1930s, apparently because of the renewed international tensions in Europe that culminated in World War II. There were no cases before the Court during the War years, the seat of the Court being under belligerent occupation for most of that time. The fact remains, however, that since World War II and, indeed, since 1931, there have been only two cases (both minor ones) brought before the Court, (or three, if we accept the Court Registry's retroactive classification, in its 1990 Annual Report, of the continuing Iran-US Claims Tribunal, which had begun its work in 1981, as one of its own cases).

By Resolution 780 of October 6, 1992 the United Nations Security Council requested the Secretary-General

to establish, as a matter of urgency, an impartial Commission of Experts to examine and analyse the information submitted […] together with such further information as the Commission of Experts may obtain through its own investigations or efforts […] with a view to providing the Secretary-General with its conclusions on the evidence of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.

As early as 1952 I launched the idea of enhancing the use of the PCA by making its arbitration facilities accessible for arbitration between states and private parties. A few years later I was requested by the Secretary-General, at that time, Prof. Francois, to draw up draft arbitration rules for this purpose. These rules, as elaborated by the International Bureau of the PCA, became the 1962 Rules of Arbitration and Conciliation for Settlement of International Disputes between Two Parties of Which Only One is a State, hereafter referred to as the 1962 Rules.