On May 18, 1899, die first Hague Peace Conference was convened in the House in the Woods provided by the Dutch royal family. It was attended by invitation by representatives of twenty-six of the fifty-nine governments that then claimed sovereignty. The hundred delegates included diplomats, statesmen (no stateswomen!), publicists, lawyers, and technical and scientific experts. Unlike earlier peace conferences, which were convened to terminate ongoing armed conflicts, the Hague Conference met in peacetime for the purpose of making law. The conference was called at the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia with the intentions principally to seek agreements to limit armaments and their consequent financial burdens, and secondarily to improve the prospects for the peaceful setdement of international disputes and to codify the laws of war. Doubtiess, the tsar’s initiative was inspired in part by his grandfather’s earlier success in obtaining the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, which prohibited, for humanitarian reasons, the use of explosive projectiles weighing less than four hundred grams. In any event, the Hague Peace Conference pursued a much broader agenda than the meetings at St. Petersburg and was able to draw upon certain preparatory work on the laws of war, including the Geneva Convention on the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Wounded in Armies in the Field of 1864, the draft Project of an International Declaration concerning the Laws and Customs of War produced by the Brussels Conference of 1874, and the Oxford Manual on the laws of war of 1880, which had been adopted unanimously by the Institute of International Law.

The belief that a world free of war might be possible, be more than simply a dream, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In earlier times, war—like disease—was a part of life. There existed then a fatalism about war that no doubt persists in many parts of the world today. During the nineteenth century, however, parts of the world developed a confidence in progress and a hope that progress might extend to the abolition of war. Most importantly for this essay, a popular belief circulated at the e nd of the century that the establishment of a permanent international court would be an important step toward a world free of war. Ad hoc arbitration, as distinct from adjudication by such a permanent court, was not the same and, by itself, not enough. The 1899 Peace Conference was a point of inflection, a turn in the river, in the effort to move beyond ad hoc international arbitration to adjudication by a permanent international court as a means to avoid war a nd preserve international peace and security.

The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and the conventions they produced, opened the doors—just barely—to the era of arms control. But they did so in a way that would not have been expected. Arms control can be understood as having two main branches—the quantitative and the qualitative. “Quantitative”refers to controls that permit a given category of weapons—such as batdeships, nuclear warheads, and andballistic missile systems—but restrict the number that each of the participating powers may hold. “Qualitative” refers to prohibitions on the use of specified items—such as explosive bullets, poison gas, and bacteriological weapons. Curiously, it was the matter of quantitative control—the desire to check the costs of the arms race—that led to the calling of the Hague Conferences, but their only arms control outcome concerned qualitative limitations. One can trace influences of the Hague experience in this regard on both sides of the arms control movement after World War I and more faintly after World War II, though its descent is less clear than that of the prisoner-of-war conventions and other law of war rules. The inclination of scholars and policymakers to neglect the arms control efforts made between the two world wars has tended to obscure the indirect influence of the Hague Conferences.

One hundred years after the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 seems an appropriate time to review the subsequent developments in codification and practice that have molded the present laws applicable to the conduct of armed conflict and, more importantly, to identify those aspects of the law that are most in need of further development in the early years of the next century. Any attempt to do so in a comprehensive and detailed manner would obviously far exceed the scope of an article; consequendy, what follows is a more selective approach, consistent with this limited scope, that focuses on the most troubled areas of the law.

The law of naval warfare as it existed in 1899 and as it is understood in 1999 exhibits a few similarities but many differences. The fundamental similarity is that the law of naval warfare can be seen, then as now, as consisting primarily of customary international law. The many differences in this law have been caused by the major changes in war at sea and the law of the sea. In 1899 war at sea meant combat primarily by gunfire between surface warships, control of maritime commerce, and shore bombardment. Today, war at sea also involves nuclear-powered aircraft carriers; supersonic aircraft, helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft; submarines; high-speed patrol craft; ballistic, cruise, and other guided missiles; long-range secure communications for command, control, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; radar; underwater sound technology; electronic and information warfare; satellites in space; unmanned aerial and undersea vehicles; and stealth and computer technology; as well as expeditionary and amphibious capabilities. Nevertheless, the fundamental role of navies continues to be to establish control at sea or to deny it to the enemy, linking that control to broad political and economic issues ashore. In view of these constants and changes, this article reviews the state of the law of naval warfare at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and assesses its future prospects.

Together with the principle prohibiting weapons “of a nature to cause superfluous injury” or “calculated to cause unnecessary suffering,” the Martens clause, in the Preamble to the Hague Conventions on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, is an enduring legacy of those instruments. In the years since its formulation, the Martens clause has been relied upon in die Nurembergjurisprudence, addressed by the International Court of Justice and human rights bodies, and reiterated in many humanitarian law treaties that regulate the means and methods of warfare. It was restated in die 1949 Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War, the 1977 Additional Protocols to those Conventions, and the Preamble to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons, albeit in slightly different versions. The Martens clause was paraphrased in Resolution XXIII of the Tehran Conference on Human Rights of 1968, and is cited or otherwise referred to in several national military manuals, including those of the United States, die United Kingdom, and Germany. Moreover, attempts have recently been made, including by parties before die International Court of Jusdce, to invoke the clause, in the absence of specific norms of customary and conventional law, to oudaw the use of nuclear weapons.

The Hague Conferences that produced the Conventions of 1899 and 1907 closed the nineteenth century and opened the twentieth. They established an agenda for negotiation, in the parliamentary-diplomatic mode, for the next hundred years; elevated the development of mechanisms of dispute resolution to new prominence; tried to order many areas of armed conflict with new international law; and, perhaps unintentionally, set parameters for the future diplomacy of international conferences.

Subsequent international lawmaking efforts grappled with many of the themes debated at The Hague, even as the political landscape of international law was completely transformed by the breakup of empires and the advent of almost two hundred new states; the founding of international organizations and regional organizations that could scarcely have been imagined in 1899, and the establishment of a truly permanent international judicial institution, followed by the creation of many other judicial institutions with more focused jurisdictions. Despite these changes, much of the style of the Hague Conferences left a deep imprint on international law. The mixture of lofty rhetoric, prophetic international legal vision, and narrow political interest of the Hague Conferences became a characteristic, even an expected feature, of collective international lawmaking efforts in this century.

In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the birth of new sovereign nations bordering the Caspian Sea, the legal status of the sea has emerged as one of the most contentious international problems facing the region. The discovery of large offshore oil and gas deposits in the area has added urgency to the need to resolve the twin issues of the legal status of the sea and the corresponding mining rights.

The Caspian, the largest inland body of water in the world, is approximately the size of Japan. The south Caspian is the deepest part and contains the most productive oil and gas fields. The oil-producing area of the south Caspian that holds the most promise extends along a narrow structural zone across the sea from the Apsheron Peninsula in Azerbaijan to the Peri-Balkhan region of western Turkmenistan.

The fifty-fifth session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights took place in Geneva from March 22 to April 30, 1999, and was chaired by Ambassador Anne Anderson of Ireland. The Commission reviewed the state of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the world, adopting eighty-two resolutions, fifty-eight by consensus, and thirteen decisions.

More than thirty-two hundred participants represented fifty-three member and ninety-one observer states, over two hundred nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and some fiftyfive specialized agencies and other organizations. Secretary-General Kofi Annan underscored the priority he attaches to human rights by stating that “the promodon and defense of human rights is at the heart of every aspect of our work and every article of our Charter. ”