The war crimes trials following the second World War and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 have posed a question about war reprisals which is likely to be important in any future war and which has immediate practical significance in the current wars in Asia. On the one hand, the trials have transformed the previously sketchy rules on reprisals into a more comprehensive and elaborate system of control. On the other hand, the Geneva Conventions have provided for almost the complete abolition of reprisals in the very area for which the rules of control were formulated. Moreover, the conventions remain unratified by many of the major Powers, of which at least one has already demonstrated its inability to observe the abolition of reprisals. The core of the problem concerns reprisals against civilian persons in occupied territories, for this was by far the most significant point in the trials on reprisals and was the subject of the most outstanding innovation introduced by the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, the issues raised by the contradiction between the trials and the conventions cannot properly be discussed without reference to the general theory of war reprisals.

The problems raised by the unwillingness en masse of the North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war to be repatriated in accord with the rights given them under the 1949 Geneva Convention, present, in a revealing perspective, the test to which the Korean conflict has put positive international law. Apart from the final solution, which is based on a United Nations resolution grounded in valid international law, the attitude of both sides throughout the Pan Mun Jom negotiations raised quite sharply several questions. Standing out among them was, on the side of the United Nations, the policy question of confidence in, and application of, international law, and the legal question of its dynamic interpretation and adjustment. More generally and, in part, de lege ferenda, the ideological basis of the war prisoner issue raised a fundamental question of values, and added a new dimension to one of the central foci in the modern development of international law: the rights of individuals, per se and in their relations to the rights of states. Viewed from this standpoint, the prominence of the prisoner-of-war question in the armistice negotiations looks much less incidental or opportunistic than some current commentaries may have made it seem.

The implementation of Article 18 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was designed to usher in a new era of open diplomacy, may be regarded as one of the more successful achievements of that organization. This fact may be evidenced by the decision of the drafters of the Charter of the United Nations to continue the practice of registration and publication of treaties which had been developed under the aegis of the League. The delegates at San Francisco, in setting up a new system to regulate this practice, were concerned, among other things, to avoid the difficulties which had arisen in connection with the interpretation of Article 18 generally, and in particular with the interpretation of the terms “ treaty”and “ international engagement” which appear therein. Article 102 of the Charter, which reads as follows, was the result of their efforts:

Expropriation of property belonging to aliens in foreign countries was unusual prior to World War I. Occasional cases could be found, but such expropriation was always restricted to one or a few owners of property who, for various reasons, came into conflict with a foreign government. Wholesale expropriation of foreign-owned property began on a moderate scale in Mexico in 1915, and was later expanded in that country. Expropriation of all kinds of property, including foreign property, was introduced by Soviet Russia after the 1917 revolution. After World War I some Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, began to expropriate the large agrarian estates of the former German, Austrian, and Hungarian nobility and other rich landowners. These expropriations were, by the terms of the agrarian reform laws, based upon compensation to be paid by the respective states.