The agreement between the United Kingdom and Egypt signed at Cairo on October 19, 1954, replaces the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of August 26, 1936, which is thereby terminated. The earlier treaty provided for the establishment of a complex of military installations and supporting facilities along the Suez Canal, and its garrisoning by British troops. The 1954 agreement provides for the gradual evacuation of this garrison from the Suez Canal base, as these installations generally are known, by June 18, 1956. During the twenty-month evacuation period (October 19, 1954–June 18, 1956) the Egyptian military forces will assume gradual control of the base, and custody of designated base installations.

In a litigation between the United States and France and Morocco, the International Court of Justice had to determine not so long ago whether United States consular jurisdiction in the French Zone of the Protectorate of Morocco extended merely to disputes among nationals and protégés of the United States, as provided for in its treaty with Morocco of 1836, or to all cases in which an American citizen or protege is a defendant. The latter—extended—type of consular jurisdiction had accrued to the United States through the operation of most-favored-nation clauses contained in its treaties with Morocco.

The Australian proclamations of September 10, 1953, claiming the continental shelf adjacent to the coasts of the Commonwealth and its Territories are interesting in several respects. They depart as to form from the British practice, and so suggest that the United Kingdom drafts have been found by the advisers to the Australian Government to be inadequate; they attempt for the first time to establish a specific relationship between the shelf and sedentary fisheries; and they raise the novel and yet important question of the competence of an Administering Power to extend the boundaries of a Trust Territory. The proclamations were issued only after careful consideration of previous claims and the academic controversies they have generated, and one may conclude from the text that, since the International Law Commission reported on the subject, the concept of the continental shelf and the character of the rights asserted in respect of it have crystallized, and that a definite pattern has now been set for future development of the law.

The relationship between treaties and municipal law has been widely discussed in this country in recent years. The discussion, however, has been limited to the problems raised by the proposed Constitutional amendments. Thus, the possibility of a conflict between the Constitution and a treaty, or between a treaty and State law, has been debated, while the possibility of a conflict between a treaty and a Federal statute has been hardly ever mentioned.

The five issues of Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo which are here reviewed (Nos. 6, 7 and 8 of 1954, and Nos. 1 and 2 of 1955) contain a series of articles devoted to a discussion of the basic notions of international law. This discussion is related to the preparation of a new textbook for Soviet law schools the completion of which this year has been announced by the A. Ya. Vyshinsky Institute of Law, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.