The development of nation States has led to a growing importance of nationality, to the expansion of the services provided by the State and to an improvement in the status of persons working in the public service. Each of these developments in the past provided grounds for the idea that only individuals possessing the nationality of the State could perform tasks in the public service.

In the last three decades since, in 1957, the first Sputnik circled the earth, a significant number of legal rules to govern space applications have been adopted.

In the field of primarily civil space activities, agreements were reached on the following instruments.

(1) The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies, of 1967.

(2) The Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space, of 1968.

(3) The Convention on International Liability to Damage Caused by Space Objects, of 1972.

(4) The Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, of 1974.

(5) The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and other Celestial Bodies, of 1979.

On top of these instruments, the UN adopted two sets of Principles, the 1982 Principles Governing Direct Television Broadcasting and the 1986 Principles Relating to Remote Sensing.

After ten years of EEC-guided harmonization of domestic legislation in the field of employees' rights in business transfers, the discussion seems to be gaining, rather than losing, momentum. In the beginning there was, on the part of the Commission, an awareness that divergent domestic rules as to the retention of rights and benefits of employees necessarily resulted in differing costs of business transfers jeopardizing the very prerequisites of a Common Market.

Conditional release regulations are known to the criminal law systems of all Western European States; in some States they have been in existence for more than a century. The implementation of conditional release was a considerable innovation in the legal systems and formed a definitive breach of the retributive legal philosophy that had guided classical penal law doctrine since the end of the eighteenth century under the influence of Montesquieu, Beccaria, Bentham and Von Feuerbach.

This article addresses the state of product liability law in the Netherlands. After discussing the purpose and the main features of the EC Product Liability Directive, it shows when the Member States of the EC should have incorporated the Directive into their national legislations.

The General Assembly of the Organization of American States which met in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, decided by a Resolution dated 9 December 1985, to convene a Fourth Inter-American Specialized Conference on Private International Law (CIDIP-IV), and not only assigned the Permanent Council to undertake all the preparatory work but also urged the Inter-American Institute of the Child (IIC) to continue the examination of matters relating to children that may be included in the Agenda of the forthcoming Conference.

The adoption of the Declaration on the Progressive Development of Principles of Public International Law relating to a New International Economic Order (Seoul Declaration) by the 62nd Conference of the International Law Association (ILA) in 1986 set the seal on eight years of hard work by the ILA's Committee on Legal Aspects of a New International Economic Order (NIEO Committee). However, it certainly did not mark the end of the Committee's efforts.

When I acceded to the chair of Special Commission 3 in March 1986, the PrepCom, consisting of 159 Member States and six observers, had already been meeting twice a year since early 1983. However, in its first year of existence most of the time was spent on procedural questions. The first report on the substantive activities of Special Commission 3 dates from 12 April 1984 in the form of a statement to the Plenary by the Chairman of Special Commission 3 on the progress of its work. Since then, reports on the progress of work have been published every spring and summer session. Such reports are not reports in the usual sense of the word (texts adopted by the Special Commission). They are prepared by the Chairman and the Secretariat and are read out in the Special Commission before they are printed as a document. The draft report is handed to the main spokesmen so that they can check whether their points of view are properly reflected. Usually there is no debate on the report in the last meeting of the session; they remain the Chairman's responsibility. In a Conference where no formal records are kept, they fulfil a special function and are carefully prepared for use as an aid in the reporting by delegations on the session and preparing for the next session.

In the era of glasnost and perestroika, one is confronted almost daily with new developments in European socialist countries, especially in the USSR, Poland and Hungary. Some States, however, have resisted the charm of Mr. Gorbachev and the lure of his policies. Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria each have their own reasons to fear the spread of what might reasonably be characterised as ‘socialist realism’ in the most positive sense, viz., an awareness that socialist States must confront the realities of late 20th century Europe in an honest and progressive way.

For someone who has spent his whole career in the search for international order and stability it is a particular honour and pleasure to be giving this Memorial Lecture.

A high point was reached in the CSCE process with the adoption of the extensive Concluding Document of the third follow-up meeting in Vienna of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) on 19 January 1989. This document, which is the result of more than two years of negotiation, is remarkable for two reasons. First, the 35 participating countries – all the European States with the exception of Albania, together with Canada and the United States – have never before achieved so much agreement on so many formerly disputed matters relating primarily to human rights as they did in Vienna. In addition, a significant advance was recorded in Vienna on the matter of supervising the performance of the obligations accepted by the CSCE States: the supervisory mechanism of the human dimension of the CSCE signifies at the same time a significant strengthening of the institutional structure of the CSCE process. It is my intention in this article to examine to what extent the Helsinki process, in particular its institutional features, has undergone a change in character as a consequence of the results achieved at the follow-up meeting. At the same time, I shall look at a number of institutional changes and adaptations that I consider to be desirable.