As the United Nations system approaches its fiftieth anniversary, there is good reason to take a fresh view of its contribution to legal order in the contemporary world. That contribution has rarely been assessed in its full generality. A half century of law creation and application by the United Nations and its specialized agencies has produced a corpus juris of impressive breadth and diversity. Not surprisingly, the greater part of this law is known only to those specially concerned with a particular area or subject. Indeed, no one can be expected to be knowledgeable in all, or even most, of the fields covered. Still, along with the diversity, common elements can be found to enable us to characterize the total product as a distinctive, multilayered legal order. This essay is an overview of its essential and interesting features. It aims particularly at informing the many nonspecialists in and outside the international law community who have reason to be interested in the process and substance of the legal contribution of the UN system.

At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, governments decided to cooperate “in an expeditious and more determined manner” to develop international law regarding liability and compensation for transnational environmental damage. UNCED, however, did not decide whether this development should proceed broadly through codification of principles or rules encompassing all types of transnational environmental damage or more narrowly through the establishment of liability and compensation regimes tailored to specific issues of environmental damage.

On June 29, 1993, President William J. Clinton transmitted to the Senate, for advice and consent to ratification, the Convention on the Marking of Plastic Explosives for the Purpose of Detection, with Technical Annex, done at Montreal on March 1, 1991. The Convention is aimed at precluding the recurrence of incidents such as the terrorist bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, and UTA (Union de Transports Aériens) Flight 172 over Niger in September 1989, as well as other incidents in which plastic explosives were utilized. To this end, it requires states producing such explosives to mark them at the time of manufacture with a substance enhancing their detectability by commercially available mechanical or canine detectors. The Convention also requires states to ensure the implementation of controls over the sale, use, and disposition of marked and unmarked plastic explosives.

The International Law Commission of the United Nations held its forty-fifth session from May 2 to July 23, 1993, under the chairmanship of Ambassador Julio Barboza of Argentina. The Commission elaborated a substantially complete draft statute of an international criminal court in a working group, considered aspects of state responsibility, commenced drafting articles on liability for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law, began its second reading on non-navigational uses of international watercourses, and made recommendations for its future work. The Commission continued its innovative use of working groups and subgroups to expedite its work and, consequently, had a highly productive session.

At its forty-fifth session in 1993, the International Law Commission took note of the report of a working group containing a Draft Statute for an International Criminal Tribunal, and transmitted that report to the General Assembly for comment. This is the second stage in a process that began in 1992, when the Commission established a Working Group on an International Criminal Court, which laid down the basic parameters for a draft statute. Its general approach was endorsed by the Commission and subsequently by the General Assembly. The Draft Statute adopted by the working group in 1993 gives effect to that approach, although with a number of refinements and much added detail. The third stage of the process is intended to occur in 1994, when the Commission hopes to adopt a final version of the Draft Statute, taking into account comments made on it at the General Assembly and elsewhere. The purpose of this Note is to outline the provisions of the Draft Statute, in the hope of furthering understanding and discussion of its provisions.

The June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights witnessed the extraordinary success of efforts by women’s rights activists worldwide to end the historic disregard of human rights violations against women. Indeed, women’s human rights was perhaps the only area in which the World Conference can be said to have met the challenge of defining a forward-looking agenda twenty-five years after the last world conference on human rights. The conference significantly expanded the international human rights agenda to include gender-specific violations. The final conference document, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, identifies particular examples of gender-specific abuses as human rights violations and calls for integration of women’s human rights throughout United Nations activities. Most strikingly, the conference crystallized a political consensus that various forms of violence against women should be examined within the context of human rights standards and in conjunction with gender discrimination. This Note reviews the treatment of women’s human rights in the Declaration and Programme of Action and related developments in the preparatory process for the World Conference.

In 1982 the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea adopted a treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, that succeeded in resolving the most fundamental questions of the law of the sea in accordance with three basic principles:

1. 1. The rules of the law of the sea must fairly balance the respective interests of all states, notably the competing coastal and maritime interests, in a manner that is generally acceptable.

2. 2. Multilateral negotiations on the basis of consensus replace unilateral claims of right as the principal means for determining that balance.

3. 3. Compulsory dispute settlement mechanisms should be adopted to interpret, apply, and enforce the balance.