The Charter of the United Nations does not contain an express provision prohibiting, permitting or regulating the question of withdrawal from the Organization. The absence of such a provision from the text of the Charter has caused uncertainty, confusion and controversy.

A Conference of plenipotentiaries, convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), met in Rio de Janeiro from May 2 to 14,1966, to consider the rational utilization of tuna resources in the Atlantic Ocean. The Conference had before it a draft convention which had been drawn up by an FAO Working Party of government representatives, and adopted and opened for signature an International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas which provides for the establishment of a new fishery commission. As the subject of intergovernmental fishery bodies is one which has been somewhat neglected by international lawyers, the purpose of this article is to examine the constitutional and legal characteristics of the proposed Commission in the context of the numerous other intergovernmental fishery bodies already in operation.

Since the very beginning of its existence the United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, has experienced how difficult it is to define the scope of the most general and fundamental principles of international law in a declaration of legal significance. Today this is still the case, as appears from the efforts undertaken since the establishment four years ago of a United Nations Special Committee, which was given the task of studying in what way and to what extent the primary principles of international law contained in the Charter could yield rules adapted to the changed world situation. Before considering in detail the most recent proceedings of the Special Committee, it seems useful briefly to recall the context within which the Committee started its work.

A question which was much discussed in legal literature in the early years of the United Nations, and which has been cited as a classic example of the effect of subsequent practice upon a provision in a multilateral treaty, has recently been raised again. This concerns the interpretation of Article 27, paragraph 3, of the Charter of the United Nations, which deals with voting in the Security Council on non-procedural matters. Both Portugal and South Africa last year reserved the position of their governments regarding the validity of Security Council Eesolution 221 of April 9, 1966, in the vote on which both France and the Soviet Union abstained. This is the resolution by which the Council, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter, called for certain measures to enforce an embargo on oil and petroleum products from reaching Southern Ehodesia through the port of Beira in Mozambique, and authorized the United Kingdom to prevent by the use of force, if necessary, the arrival at Beira of vessels reasonably believed to be carrying oil destined for Rhodesia.

Substantial efforts have been made since the close of World War II to transfer resources directly from the richer to the poorer countries in order to foster economic development. There have been multilateral lending agencies such as the International Bank for Eeconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Development Association, the new Asian Development Bank, and the United Nations’ Special Fund; bilateral American programs such as the lending and granting activities of the Export-Import Bank and the various AID programs; bilateral foreign programs such as the French and British loan and grant programs to their respective former colonial territories (and the few which remain under formal political tutelage), the Japanese loan and grant programs in the form of reparations and successor programs, the German loan program (largely in the form of short to mediumterm export credits); and loose co-ordinating or aid-policy discussion centers such as the Colombo Plan and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.