When the Court began the revision of its rules of procedure in 1967, the approach then followed was to attempt a systematic revision of the Rules in their entirety and as an integrated whole. However, in 1972, the Cour suspended the full-scale and complete revision it had initiated and decided instead simply to amend certain articles of the existing Rules of Court.

The present article examines the provisions on the western frontier of Poland in the treaties concluded by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1970 with the Soviet Union and Poland. The emphasis will be on the Polish-German Treaty, which is essentially concerned with the settlement of the frontier issue between the two parties. The article deals with the position of the German party and its competence to enter into treaty obligations that bear on the frontiers of Germany, as well as with the competence of the Great Powers to do so. Further, the article elucidates the meaning and effects of the resolution which the German Bundestag adopted when it voted the laws which approved the treaties and enabled the President of the Federal Republic to ratify them. Against this background of the competences of the interested states, the article briefly analyzes the contents of the clauses that bear on the Oder-Neisse frontier.

The present legal status of Berlin after the conclusion on September 3, 1971 of the Quadripartite Agreement between France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States can only be understood in terms of its own historical development and the context of the international politics of the 1960s. Although any legal and political analysis of divided Germany and Berlin must take into account a period of history dating back to the 1940s, it is assumed here that the essential facts are sufficiently well known to serve as a background for the following analysis.

On October 18, 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union completed the negotiation of a comprehensive series of arrangements covering trade between the two countries. A Trade Agreement, consisting of nine articles and three annexes, and complemented by several exchanges of letters, establishes a new legal framework for the development of US-USSR trade.

The agenda that faced the International Law Commission at the first meeting of the 24th session on May 2, 1972, was a formidable one. The 23rd session in 1971, despite an extension to fourteen weeks in place of the usual ten, had been able to complete work on the draft articles on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations only by concentrating on that subject to the substantial exclusion of other topics. As a consequence the Commission had not made any real progress on the other active subjects before it, which included State Succession in respect of treaties and in respect of matters other than treaties, as divide between two Special Rapporteurs, State Responsibility, the Most-Favoured-Nation Clause, and Treaty Law of International Organizations. In addition, the Commission had before it another piece of unfinished business, the review of its longterm program of work in light of the wide-ranging and thoughtful “Survey of International Law” which had been prepared in 1971 by the U.N. Secretariat at the Commission request.