On sait qu'aux premières pages de son livre, Savigny pose que l'on pourrait tout aussi bien—sinon mieux!—résoudre les conflits de lois en répondant à la question de savoir quel droit doit être appliqué aux rapports de droit (internationaux) qu'en partant des règles de droit. Les statutistes partent en majeure partie (bien que non entièrement) de la domination des règles de droit; pour Savigny c'est le rapport de droit qui vient en premier lieu. (Bien que parfois il ne dédaignât pas de faire appel au caractère d'une règle comme statut personnel ou réel).

By the end of 1967, space diplomacy proved capable of accomplishing an international agreement at the speed of space travel itself. On the very last day before the end of its 22nd Session, the United Nations General Assembly was confronted with an Agreement on the Rescue and Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space and almost simultaneously adopted a resolution in which it “commends” the Agreement. What a United Nations Committee had not been able to produce in five years of hard work, emerged suddenly from private negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although many of the Agreement's particular provisions submitted by the two space powers had their origin in earlier texts discussed in the UN Outer Space Committee and its legal subcommittee, the fact remains that it was a bilateral draft which was rushed through the multilateral arena.

One of the attractions of history and its enigmatic lessons consists in the fact, that, from age to age, nothing changes much, yet everything is different. On August 18, 1962, the Venezuelan Government requested the inclusion on the Agenda of the Seventeenth Session of the United Nations General Assembly of the item, “Question of boundaries between Venezuela and the territory of British Guyana”. Historians and international lawyers had presumed that this particular international dispute had long been settled and become a memory faded, though still fragrant, in international law case and textbooks.

Kollewijns “Tien Jaren Nederlandse Rechtspraak internationaal privaatrecht (1954–1963)” is een juweel! Het boek bevat een schat van gegevens op internationaal privaatrechtelijk gebied.

The recognition that man as such, irrespective of persons, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion, has the right to live in circumstances in which his humanity can develop, has a long history.

In our civilization the rights of man have been wrested from authority in the national sphere by a gradual process. Magna Charta formulated as universal human rights certain rights to freedom, but at that time the liber homo, who was supposed to have a claim to these rights, was only the human being who belonged to a small group of “lords temporal and spiritual”. In the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, it was rather the rights of the “citoyen” than of man as such that were formulated: it was mainly a matter here of the rights to freedom of the bourgeois citizen. There was a gradual development in the law systems of the West European countries of the universal rights of man, as they were expressed, both in our country and elsewhere, in universal suffrage. In Russia the recognition of the human rights was achieved by revolution with the Declaration of the toiling and exploited masses, in which the human position of the dispossessed was strikinglyformulated. Thus it was by different ways that not merely the nobleman and the bourgeois, but every one came be regarded as a full human being.

Only three years after the first milestone on the road towards the establishment of a legal regime of outer space was reached through the unanimous adoption by the XVIII General Assembly of the United Nations of a “Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space” (13th December 1963, no. 1962), a second landmark was passed.

La crise qui a, en juin 1965, ébranlé la Communauté économique européenne est encore présente à toutes les mémoires. Elle a pu être surmontée, au moins provisoirement, grâce à certains “accords” réalisés à Luxembourg à la suite d'une réunion des Ministres des Affaires étrangères des six Etats membres. L'importance intrinsèque de ces “accords de Luxembourg” est de ce seul fait indéniable, même si leur portée exacte a pu être diversement appréciée.

Self-determination: a cry of the French Revolution, and a revolutionary cry at that. As a revolutionary cry, it can have little to do with the antithesis of revolution: law. Self-determination, actually, belongs to the realm not of law, but of history. Nevertheless, as an historical phenomenon, it is of necessity linked up with international law. In the words of the much regretted Telders, indeed, “international law essentially is a border-line notion in the sense, inter alia, of being itself a border, i.e., the border between the realm—the category—of law and the realm or category of history”. But if international law thus partakes both of law and of history, the fact alone does not suffice to give an adequate insight in the nature of the relation between historical self-determination and international law so understood. To that end, we should probe somewhat deeper into the relation between international law and history generally.

Greater scholarly efforts have been expended by writers in continental Europe than in the English-speaking countries in tracing the development of theories of the conflict of laws. Even among the continental authorities, however, this writer has not found any substantial piece of scholarship addressed specifically to the development of the conflicts rules relating to marriage. The history of marriage conflicts rules deserves treatment apart from the history of conflicts rules generally, because essential marriage law and essential marriage conflicts law were for a long while exclusively the province of the Church, and not addressed by secular jurists.

Het Verdrag over het recht, toepasselijk op alimentatieverplichtingen jegens kinderen van 24 okt. 1956 is een van de relatief bijzonder geslaagde haagse traktaten. Niet alleen is het tot op heden al in zeven westeuropese landen van kracht, maar bovendien wordt het daar veel-vuldig toegepast. Deze laatste omstandigheid is wel vooral toe te schrij-ven aan de kombinatie van ijver in het prokreatieve en laksheid in de nazorg bij de betrokken vaders; maar dat de Haagse Conferentie voor de eenmaking van het internationaal privaatrecht rekening heeft gehouden met dit maatschappelijke basisgegeven is haar als een Verdienste aan te rekenen.

International concern for human rights was in the minds of many who were involved in the drafting of the charter for a new world organization in the closing days of the Second World War. This concern for human rights found its expression in a number of provisions of the United Nations Charter. However, proposals to incorporate in or annex to the Charter a definition or an enumeration of fundamental human rights did not commend themselves to the San Francisco Conference. Similarly, attempts to make provision in the Charter for the implementation of human rights also met with opposition. The Great Powers in particular were afraid that the world organization would actively impose human rights on the individual countries. Consequently, a certain degree of disappointment prevailed among the advocates of effective international protection of human rights. A last-minute move by American non-governmental organizations, whose representatives were attached in an advisory capacity to the United States delegation at the San Francisco Conference, resulted in enlisting the United States' support for an express reference in the Charter to the creation of a commission for the promotion of human rights. The United States, on its part, succeeded in obtaining the backing of the other three Sponsoring Powers (China, UK and USSR) for this idea. As a result, Article 68 of the Charter provides that “The Economic and Social Council shall set up commissions in economic and social fields and for the promotion of human rights, and such other commissions as may be required for the performance of its functions”. Among the functional commissions subsequently created by the Economic and Social Council, the Commission on Human Rights is the only one specifically referred to in the United Nations Charter.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, can be considered as a consolidation of the ideas and principles that are expressed in the preamble and in different articles of the Charter of the United Nations pertaining to human rights. As far as international law is concerned the declaration contained numerous elements which served to stimulate the development of new rules in this discipline. Although the declaration did not mention the use of regional arrangements for the realization of its aims, the development during the past twenty years tends clearly in this direction. In the course of this study a distinction shall be made between matters which fall within the competence of a State, a regional organization or an international organization with a worldwide stature. These spheres of action will be labelled domestic, regional and international jurisdiction respectively.