The second substantive session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea was held at Geneva from March 26 to May 10, 1975. It was decided at the outset that this would be a negotiating session. There was no general debate. Few formal meetings were held. Even informal working groups of the whole tended to rely on smaller groups the work of which was necessarily removed from public view. Progress, in many respects substantial progress, was made toward producing generally acceptable texts in this way. However, the Conference did not complete the negotiation of a new Law of the Sea Convention or approved texts.

The basic objective of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea is to adopt a comprehensive Law of the Sea Convention. From the records of the long preparatory work of the Conference by the UN Seabed Committee and the discussions at both the Caracas and Geneva sessions of the Conference, it is clear that the final product will be a treaty creating new rules of international law and also updating certain traditional ones. In effect, the comprehensive Law of the Sea Convention is intended to establish a new world order in the ocean space.

In pursuing a consistent policy of peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems, proletarian internationalism, and strengthening relations with socialist and developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the Soviet State concludes over 400 treaties and agreements a year.

The “Protocol of Buenos Aires,” which revised the Charter of the Organization of American States, entered into force in 1970. It changed the legal status of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in a number of important respects and strengthened the normative character of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. These are most significant developments, and yet they have gone largely unnoticed in the literature.

In a series of newspaper columns and stories beginning March 19, 1975 the American public was told apparently correctly about the partial success of the Central Intelligence Agency in raising a Soviet submarine, its equipment, and dead crew from the Pacific Ocean floor. The location of the pertinent activities was reported to be well beyond any state's claim to territorial waters, continental shelves, contiguous zones, or other asserted inhibiting zones. The CIA vessel, The Glomar Explorer, was disguised as a commercially operated oceanographic research vessel. No international legal implications seem to have been perceived by the newspapers in the American intelligence activities.

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 United States Department of State.