On May 12, 1981, the President of the International Court of Justice ordered the discontinuance of the Case concerning United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran (United States of America v. Iran) (Hostages case). Following the indication of provisional measures in December 1979 and the Judgment in May 1980, the present Order ended the proceedings in the case. This is the first order to apply the (Revised) Rules of Court of 1978 concerning the discontinuance of proceedings. It therefore appears to be an appropriate time to comment on this topic of international procedure.

A suit cannot be pressed, whether on the domestic or international level, without supporting evidence. The processes of gathering such evidence are carefully regulated in many developed legal systems, in part because experience has shown that too zealous a pursuit of evidence can easily transform institutions designed to resolve conflict into a rationalization and a setting for possibly even more rancorous conflict. When some part of the state apparatus is prosecuting a case, liberal democracies have often imposed more stringent regulations as part of what we may call, in a nondocumentary sense, the “constitutional” or “rule of law” tradition, that continuing compact between governors and governed about restraint in the use of official power.

One of the characteristic phenomena of contemporary international life is the proliferation of human rights instruments and systems of supervision. In addition to the Charter of the United Nations and comprehensive global conventions such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Economic Covenant) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Political Covenant), instruments have been adopted within the United Nations or the specialized agencies to govern particular aspects of human rights (e.g., racial discrimination, rights of women) and within regional organizations (e.g., the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States) to govern both general and particular aspects of human rights. In the United Nations, the general practice has been for each normative instrument to create its own system of supervision whenever such systems have been established. Typically, each organ of supervision applies only the norms adopted in the specific “founding” instrument, rather than the entire corpus juris of international human rights or even all of the instruments comprising the International Bill of Human Rights, i.e., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Universal Declaration), the Economic Covenant, the Political Covenant, and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This proliferation of normative instruments and systems of supervision, which is similar to the proliferation that has given rise to difficult questions of coordination within and between international organizations in the fields of budget, programming, and administration, has led to overlapping jurisdiction and even to conflicts between the legislative and supervisory competence, or claims of competence, of various international bodies. The object of this article is not to compile or map out all the possible conflict areas or to undertake a detailed analysis of the conflicts, whether real or imaginary. Its more modest purpose is to present a broad panorama of the problems, directions, and policy. These matters merit attention, even though political and institutional reasons may make major reforms impossible for the time being. The questions to be discussed are relevant to three major fields of international law: treaties, human rights, and international organizations. While substantive problems of “legislation” or norm making are closely related to problems of supervision or implementation, normative problems will be focused upon first, and problems of supervision second.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (the Convention), concluded on May 23, 1969, entered into force on January 27, 1980. It thus took more than 10 years for 35 states to ratify the instrument or to accede to it. Although its entry into force may hasten ratification and accession somewhat in other states, it will probably be a very long time before a large majority of states are parties to the Convention. Therefore, international treaty practice will long be faced with the conclusion of treaties between or among states that are parties to the Convention and other states.

In the late 18th and 19th, and the early 20th centuries invaluable contributions were made by lawyers to the establishment of international law in the United States. Their contributions took various forms, but all helped establish, clarify, or disseminate understanding of this branch of the law. Because of the ways international law develops, these people ranged from statesmen who established practices and doctrines in the international field that ultimately became the law, to those who participated in the development of important treaties and international agreements; and from judges who rendered significant decisions on points of international law, to scholars and others who were responsible for the gradual evolution of education and literature in the field.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.