Nine years ago, Kenneth Abbott published an article exhorting international lawyers to read and master regime theory, arguing that it had multiple uses for the study of international law. He went as far as to call for a “joint discipline” that would bridge the gap between international relations theory (IR) and international law (IL). Several years later, one of us followed suit with an article mapping the history of the two fields and setting forth an agenda for joint research. Since then, political scientists and international lawyers have been reading and drawing on one another’s work with increasing frequency and for a wide range of purposes. Explicitly interdisciplinary articles have won the Francis Deák Prize, awarded for the best work by a younger scholar in this Journal, for the past two years running; the publication of an interdisciplinary analysis of treaty law in the Harvard International Law Journal prompted a lively exchange on the need to pay attention to legal as well as political details; and the Hague Academy of International Law has scheduled a short course on international law and international relations for its millennial lectures in the year 2000. Further, the American Society of International Law and the Academic Council on the United Nations System sponsor joint summer workshops explicidy designed to bring young IR and IL scholars together to explore the overlap between their disciplines.

Modern discussions of the sources of international law usually begin with a reference to Article 38 (1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which provides:

Over a very short period, the few decades since the early 1970s, “indigenous peoples” has been transformed from a prosaic description without much significance in international law and politics, into a concept with considerable power as a basis for group mobilization, international standard setting, transnational networks and programmatic activity of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations.

A decade ago, my predecessor as Editor in Chief wrote a trenchant critique of what he saw as a tendency of the United States not to give its treaty obligations the weight they deserved. I return to the subject to report that the last ten years have seen an alarming exacerbation of that situation. The mood in the United States about treaty commitments has turned distinctly negative. This has gone so far as to dismay both actual and potential treaty partners of the United States and, in general, all who are concerned about the performance of the country in the realm of international law. Some of the manifestations of this mood can be dismissed as eccentric, at the level of Christian militias’ expressions of anxiety about the prospects of black-painted helicopters dropping United Nations forces into Montana and Idaho. The more worrisome part of it is the prevalence of distaste for treaty commitments in Congress and other influential circles, including the media.

The rapid and fundamental developments in the last few years on the establishment of individual criminal responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law have been such that it is now an appropriate time to assess their principal features.

The AJIL Board of Editors wishes to announce the retirement of the Co-Editors in Chief, Professors Theodor Meron of the New York University School of Law and Detlev Vagts of Harvard Law School. As of the October 1998 issue, the editorial leadership will be assumed by Professors Jonathan Charney of the Vanderbilt University School of Law and W. Michael Reisman of Yale Law School.

The Board of Editors takes great pleasure in announcing that the Francis Deák Prize for 1998 was awarded to Professors Jutta Brunnée and Stephen J. Toope for their article Environmental Security and Freshwater Resources: Ecosystem Regime Building, which appeared in the January 1997 issue at page 26. The authors are both members of Canadian law faculties, Professor Brunnée at the University of British Columbia, and Professor Toope at McGill University.

On March 7, 1995, Conoco oil company of Houston, Texas, announced that it had entered into a contract with Iran to have a Netherlands-based affiliate assist in the development of the Sirri Island oil field. In response, the Clinton administration issued Executive Order No. 12,957, prohibiting participation by U.S. entities in the development of Iranian petroleum resources. Eventually, Conoco withdrew from its contract, but in early May of 1995 the administration stepped up its pressure on Iran by issuing Executive Order No. 12,959, prohibiting U.S. entities from using foreign entities they owned or controlled to make investments in or conduct trade transactions with Iran. On July 13 of that year, the French oil company Total S.A. entered into an agreement with Iran to replace Conoco in developing the Sirri Island field, and over the next several months Iran struck nearly a dozen petroleum development agreements worth in excess of $50 million each with other foreign oil companies. Within a couple of months, both Houses of the U.S. Congress took up consideration of proposals to complicate Iran’s ability to develop its hydrocarbon resources. By the end of 1995, the proposals, which even extended to wholly foreign entities organized and operating outside the United States, had come to include Libya as well. Final passage of one of the proposals, specifically, H.R. 3107, took place in the Senate and the House in July 1996. It was signed into law as the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) on August 5.

The Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (Preparatory Committee or committee) held its sixth and final session from March 16 to April 3, 1998, at the United Nations headquarters in New York. At this session it completed its work of preparing a consolidated text of a statute for a permanent international criminal court (ICC) for adoption at a diplomatic conference in Rome held from June 15 to July 17, 1998. The consolidated text is considerably longer than the draft statute submitted by the International Law Commission to the UN General Assembly in July 1994 (ILC draft statute) and contains many different options submitted by states, but it is still largely consistent with the basic structure of the ILC draft statute.

Regular readers of this Journal will be familiar with the idea of developing a set of minimum humanitarian standards to provide greater protection of human rights in situations of internal conflict. The idea was first put forward in 1983 by Professor Theodor Meron as both a necessary and an effective means of closing the gap in legal protection that exists in internal conflicts that fall outside the scope of applicability of international humanitarian law, and where human rights norms might be insufficient. The idea became more concrete in 1990 with the adoption of the Declaration on Minimum Humanitarian Standards in Turku/Åbo, Finland, now often referred to as the “Turku Declaration,” by a group of experts convened by the Institute for Human Rights at Abo Akademi University.

In October 1997, a little-noticed event took place at the United Nations that may roll back the international legal protection of human rights. Jamaica became the first country to denounce the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and thus withdrew the right of individual petition to the UN Human Rights Committee (Committee). Although it is provided for under the Protocol’s Article 12, no state has previously made such a denunciation.