One of the fears mentioned most often in regard to the ending of border controls within the European Union is that it will make it easier for transnational terrorists to perpetrate their cross-frontier crimes. And this despite the fact that there are within the Treaty of European Union (hereinafter TEU) mechanisms designed to meet the problem. The defenders of open borders would point to the Third Pillar of the TEU as showing how the Member States have agreed in international conclave to fight transnational terrorism. However, this reference to an international agreement ignores the fact that the attitude of States towards transnational terrorism, even States within Europe, has hardly been rigorous in the past. This article looks at the effectiveness of international measures taken to combat transnational terrorism and the reasons that lie behind the limitations found within those laws. While the relaxation of border controls may be ‘the spark that lit the fire,’ the effectiveness of international anti-terrorist agreements in general is of such fundamental relevance that some consideration is due this wider question in order to determine possible future strategies towards transnational terrorism, whether within the European Union or beyond. It is these more fundamental issues that are the focus of this article.

Since the outbreak of the Second Gulf Crisis the question of the role of the United Nations Security Council in the maintenance of peace and security within the context of the institutionalized collective security system provided for in the UN Charter, and the closely related question of the principal legal and political limitations on the exercise of its authority under Chapter VII of the Charter, have been at the forefront of attention.

Apart from the proverbial exception to the rule, all changes in the composition of the international community of States resulting from State succession, whether through decolonization or through the uniting or separation of States, are reflected in the membership of the United Nations. In the first 50 years of its existence the number of member States of the organization has almost quadrupled, and this growth is to a large extent attributable to a multitude of cases of State succession, the majority of which resulted from decolonization. When these ‘new’ States began to outnumber the ‘old’ ones, State succession, and in particular the international legal implications of State succession, became a ‘hot issue’ on the UN agenda, especially on the International Law Commission's (ILC) agenda.

Cases brought against the Islamic Republic of Iran by dual nationals of Iran and the United States constitute the principal work of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in the mid-1990s. While the first decade of the Tribunal's work was devoted primarily to the arbitration of claims of US corporations against Iran and Iranian entities, most of the corporate claims had been decided or settled by the end of 1992. At that time, the second phase of the Tribunal's work, dominated by its consideration of claims of dual nationals, began.