The military interventions initiated by Israel, the United Kingdom, and France in Egypt and by the Soviet Union in Hungary, during October and November, 1956, have different historical backgrounds and different political purposes. They may have been politically connected with one another, and in any case they were connected by the fact that they occurred at the same time and were all dealt with by the United Nations. It is the purpose of this article to examine the legal justification for these interventions with only the minimum historical background necessary for that purpose. The criteria for aggression which the writer developed in the July, 1956, number of this Journal will be assumed and for their justification the reader is referred to that article.

The impact of the nationalization by the Egyptian Government on July 26, 1956, of the Suez Canal Company (Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez) upon international affairs is still reverberating. The questions of international law and other problems to which it gives rise are manifold, but this article will be restricted to an examination of four of them: first, the international and legal status of the Suez Canal Company; second, the nature and legal status of concession agreements which are referred to in the text of the Convention of October 29, 1888; third, the international status and control of the Suez Canal, particularly under the 1888 Convention; and fourth, the matter of compensation.

The purpose of this paper is to test further a theory of international law, developed elsewhere in outline and primarily based on the evidence of the work of international judicial institutions and Anglo-American state practice. The main thesis is that, on the level of unorganized international society, international law can be presented in terms of a system of interrelated legal rules from which seven fundamental principles of international law can be abstracted.

The Soviet Union, since its inception in 1917, has been the world’s largest source of refugees and displaced persons. This in itself would be sufficient motive to examine the Soviet attitude towards this category of individuals, but apart from mere quantity, the question is of interest, too, for other reasons: Russian refugees were the cause and the first subjects of international legal attempts to solve the problem; Soviet policies toward them have been unusual at all times, resulting in some bold innovations in international law; and most refugees and displaced persons at present come from behind the Iron Curtain, thereby involving the Soviet Union and its satellites, whose policies are influenced by and modeled on the Soviet experience.

There are no established definitions in law for describing the upper regions of the atmosphere or the space beyond the atmosphere. The legal dictionaries and the law encyclopedias do not even refer to the stratosphere or the areas above.