The succeeding discussion looks at some of the concrete record of governmental practice (whether provincial or federal) in Canada, under the impact of the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec, in important areas of foreign affairs and trans-national cultural, social, and commercial relations generally. Its thesis will be, first, that at the level of constitutional law-in-action important changes and modifications are occurring in Canada which largely render out-of-date certain traditional a priori concepts and attitudes as to inter-governmental relations within a federal system; second, that these de facto changes, which are already ripening through sustained practice and observance into conventional constitutional law, tend to present the Privy Council’s work on the Canadian constitution and its interpretation in a new and rather more favourable light (in comparison perhaps with the record of the Canadian Supreme Court); and, third, that the constitutional changes that have, in fact, occurred in this area make good sense in pragmatic, experiential terms, having regard to the inner dynamics of Canadian federalism today and to the aspirations of the main contending power groups, the new positive law of the constitution thus coming very close to being also community “living law” in Canada.

The purpose of this article is to show how legal norms are evolving in an activity newly opened for man by very recent and farreaching technological developments.

The 1963 Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) define a “broadcasting satellite service” as “a space service in which signals transmitted or retransmitted by space stations, or transmitted by reflection from objects in orbit around the Earth, are intended for direct reception by the general public.” Direct satellite broadcasting thus refers to the transmission of messages directly to the houses or communities of the general public via artificial space satellites. While such a system does not exist at present, it is expected that it will be feasible within less than a decade.

Our special area is international law and organization and our particular concern is the process by which international public policy is enforced by international political organizations, especially through the media of economic modalities.

It is a commonplace that much of the analytical philosophy of law of the last one hundred years controls and conditions, consciously or unconsciously, the thinking and, perhaps, the practice of law and modern affairs. This fact is of special importance to international lawyers because the analytical approach to law contains a bias in favour of domestic or national law. This is understandable, for legal philosophy was first propounded to explain domestic phenomena.

The General Assembly of the United Nations at its twenty-second session unanimously adopted by Resolution 2312 (XXII) of December 14, 1967, a “Declaration on Territorial Asylum.” This Resolution reads:

The General Assembly,

Recalling its resolutions 1839 (XVII) of 19 December 1962, 2100 (XX) of 20 December 1965 and 2203 (XXI) of 16 December 1966 concerning a declaration on the right of asylum,

Considering the work of codification to be undertaken by the International Law Commission in accordance with General Assembly resolution 1400 (XIV) of 21 November 1959,

Adopts the following Declaration

The relationship of state sovereignty and the jurisdiction of international tribunals presents one of the main problems in the law of international adjudication. Submission to the jurisdiction of a tribunal implies a partial surrender of sovereignty. The extent of the surrender may be said to be proportionate to the degree of discretion open to the tribunal concerned when deciding a case submitted to it. The present study will deal with an important aspect of this judicial freedom of determination, namely, the extent to which the World Court can seek to discover the facts and circumstances of a dispute independently of the evidence and information brought before it voluntarily by the parties.

For over fifty years there has been international co-operation in the control of narcotic drugs. This co-operation has expanded in scope and depth as the years have passed since January 23, 1912, when the International Opium Convention was signed at The Hague. Four more conventions and three protocols deal with the international control of narcotics, and two agreements aim at suppressing opium-smoking in the Far East. The most recent convention, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs signed at New York on March 30, 1961, does little to advance the steps already taken but rather consolidates much of the work accomplished in the preceding years.

La Question de l’immunité de juridiction des Etats étrangers est particulièrement liée au rôle joué pas les Etats tant dans le domaine interne qu’international. Il est devenu banal de dire que les activités étatiques ont envahi, depuis le début de ce siècle, des domaines considérés jusqu’alors comme étant réservés a l’initiative de personnes ou institutions strictement privées. Les conséquences de ce changement sont importantes. A ce point même que sur le plan interne beaucoup d’Etats ont eu à faire face à des problèmes de réaménagement de leurs structures qui, conçues dans une autre époque, n’avaient pas prévu le montée extraordinaire de l'Exécutif au détriment du Pouvoir législatif.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade contains many provisions dealing with non-Tariff barriers to international trade, but the most significant obligations imposed upon the contracting parties to the General Agreement are those set out in Part I, namely, the obligation to extend most-favoured-nation treatment to other contracting parties and the obligation to apply to imports from other contracting parties treatment “no less favourable than that provided for in the appropriate Part of the appropriate Schedule annexed to this Agreement” (Art. II :I (a)). There is annexed to the General Agreement a Schedule in respect of each contracting party, recording the tariff concessions which that party is obliged by Article II to extend to its GATT trading partners. These concessions are constantly being modified, however, and if the General Agreement is to record accurately the tariff obligations of the parties, the Schedules must keep up-to-date with these modifications. Unhappily, in the years following the provisional entry into force of the General Agreement, the Schedules became hopelessly outdated, caught up in a tangle of amending “protocols” and “certifications” to the point where they ceased to be useful either to the contracting parties or to the commercial community as a record of the tariff obligations of the parties. The present note describes the origin of the GATT schedule problem and the steps taken by the contracting partieas to resolve it and restore the Schedules to a useful function, an interesting exercise in the application of treaty law and procedures to the rather unusual amendment provisions of the General Agreement.

The dramatic increase in the number of incidents of unlawful seizure of aircraft during 1968 and the first few months of 1969 has posed one of the most difficult problems ever faced by the international aviation community. The purpose of this note is to examine the existing state of the law governing the unlawful seizure of aircraft, discuss the efforts of air lawyers to attack the problem from the legal point of view, examine proposed legal solutions put forward in ICAO in the last half of 1968 and early 1969, and indicate the extent to which acceptable legal solutions may be found. As will be seen, although the Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft contains a number of provisions on the unlawful seizure of aircraft, it by no means provides solutions for all existing problems.