Nous sommes réunis pour comm´morer la fondation de la Commission d'Etat pour la codification du droit international privé; celle-ci fut fondée par décrêt du 20 février 1897 N° 1 de la Reine Mère Emma, Régente du Royaume, au nom de Sa Majesté la Reine Wilhelmine, sur proposition du Ministre des Affaires Etrangères et du Ministre de la Justice.

At a Conference held in Mexico City from 17th to 28th September 1970, the statutes of a new universal intergovernmental organisation, The World Tourism Organisation, were drawn up, to become effective and the organisation bought into being 120 days after 51 competent States have signified their acceptance of them. These statutes were drawn up in circumstances which, from a legal point of view, can only be regarded as decidedly unusual. Basically what happened was that the International Union of Official Travel Organisations, IUOTO, an international non-governmental organisation, was attempting to secure a means whereby it could “transform” itself from its private law status into a fully-fledged international intergovernmental organisation, governed by public international law, and this without any break in the continuity of legal personality between the two situations. The story of the metamorphosis of IUOTO makes interestingreading.

In operative paragraph 2 of resolution 2750 C (XXV) of 17 December 1970, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided to convene in 1973 a new Conference on the Law of the Sea. Although this Conference will also deal with older aspects of the law of the sea, the cause of this decision was not so much the failure of the conference of 1960 as the necessity to meet the need for legal rules for completely new maritime activities, viz. the use of the floor and subsoil of the deepest oceans. The general philosophy and leading principles on which the new regulation will have to be based, are embodied in General Assembly res. 2749 (XXV), also of 17 December 1970, containing a “Declaration of Principles governing the Sea-Bed and the Ocean Floor, and the Subsoil thereof, beyond the Limits of National Jurisdiction”, the first concrete result of three years UN activities on the subject. The article tries to give an evaluation of the several principles of the Declaration, as well as of the procedure by which they have been brought about, all this in view of the announced international conference.