Accountability for crimes, a theme central to Shakespeare’s plays, is also extraordinarily pertinent to our times. Newspapers have reported on the care taken by the leaders of the former Yugoslavia to order atrocities against “enemy” populations only in the most indirect and euphemistic way. Even the Nazi leaders constantly resorted to euphemisms in referring to the Holocaust. No explicit written order from Hitler to carry out the final solution has ever been found. At the height of their power, the Nazis treated the data on the killing of Jews as top secret. Similarly, a high-ranking member of the former security police told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that written instructions to kill antiapartheid activists were never given; squad members who carried out the killings simply got “a nod of the head or a wink-wink kind of attitude.”

In the April 1997 issue of the Journal, I reported on three cases in which the response to an action brought in the court of one country led not to an answer, but to a countersuit in another country—for an antisuit injunction, a declaration of nonliability or both. One of the cases I discussed arose out of a controversy between an asbestos manufacturer, CSR, and a group of insurance companies, the Cigna Group, that may or may not have been obligated to defend and indemnify the manufacturer in respect of claims in the United States for product liability. The manufacturer brought suit in federal court in New Jersey, raising both contract and antitrust claims. The insurers, as I reported, succeeded in securing an antisuit injunction in the Supreme Court of New South Wales (a court of first instance), and thereafter in defeating a motion by the manufacturer to stay or dismiss, on grounds of forum non conveniens, the insurers’ action seeking a declaration of nonliability. I thought that outcome was wrong: in my view, the Australian court should not have stepped into the controversy, and the insurers should have brought their challenge to the jurisdiction and suitable venue of the New Jersey court in that court.

The Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on May 21, 1997. It was negotiated in the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the General Assembly, convening for this purpose as a “Working Group of the Whole,” on the basis of draft articles adopted by the International Law Commission (ILC). The negotiations in the working group were open to participation by all UN member states, as well as states that are members of specialized agencies of the United Nations. The Convention is divided into seven parts containing thirty-seven articles: Introduction; General Principles; Planned Measures; Protection, Preservation and Management; Harmful Conditions and Emergency Situations; Miscellaneous Provisions; and Final Clauses. An annex sets forth procedures to be used in the event the parties to a dispute have agreed to submit it to arbitration. This Note will focus on key provisions of the Convention and on those that were the subject of controversy during the working group’s deliberations. It assumes that the reader has access to the text.

The International Law Commission of the United Nations held its forty-ninth session in Geneva from May 12 to July 18, 1997, under the chairmanship of Professor Alain Pellet of France. The Commission concluded its first reading of a draft declaration on nationality in relation to the succession of states; adopted preliminary conclusions on a key element of the topic of reservations to treaties; and appointed new special rapporteurs for state responsibility, international liability for injurious consequences of acts not prohibited by international law, unilateral acts of states, and diplomatic protection. The Commission also established working groups on each of these topics.

The fifty-third session of the UN Commission on Human Rights took place in Geneva from March 10 to April 18, 1997, with Miroslav Somol of the Czech Republic serving as chairman. More than twenty-three hundred individuals were in attendance, representing fifty-three member and ninety-two observer states, over two hundred nongovernmental organizations, and some forty specialized agencies, UN bodies and other organizations.

The Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (Preparatory Committee or committee) held its third and fourth sessions from February 10 to 21, 1997, and August 4 to 15, 1997, bringing the world a step closer to the establishment of a permanent international criminal court (ICC). The United Nations General Assembly, on December 16, 1996, reaffirmed the mandate of the Preparatory Committee and decided that the committee would meet in four more sessions (the final two from December 1 to 12, 1997, and March 16 to April 3, 1998) “in order to complete the drafting of a widely acceptable consolidated text of a convention, to be submitted to a diplomatic conference.” It also decided that “a diplomatic conference of plenipotentiaries will be held in 1998, with a view to finalizing and adopting a convention on the establishment of an international criminal court”; the conference is now scheduled to open in Rome on June 15,1998, and to last five weeks. The General Assembly urged participation in the committee “by the largest number of States so as to promote universal support for an international criminal court” and requested that the Secretary-General establish a voluntary fund to facilitate participation in the committee and the diplomatic conference by the least developed countries.

On April 1-4, 1997, the International Court of Justice visited the sites of the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Project in Slovakia and Hungary. This was the first site visit that the Court has undertaken in fulfillment of its judicial function and was therefore an occasion of particular interest to international jurists.

The Treaty Section of the United Nations is engaged in a major effort to disseminate its vast collection of both bilateral and multilateral treaties by electronic means, including the Internet. As an essential complementary measure, the publication of the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) is to be brought up to date. Both these objectives have presented a range of challenges, not the least of which is securing the requisite resources in the current financial climate. In this paper these challenges (legal, technical and financial) and the approaches that have been adopted to deal with them will be discussed.