It is provided by Article 1(1) of the United Nations Charter that the adjustment or settlement of disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace is to be brought about in conformity with the principles of justice and international law. There is much controversy about the precise meaning of this article, but its broad intention is clear; that if the United Nations is to command respect, without which its recommendations and decisions can never be effective, its organs must not act, or give occasion to be suspected of acting, in an unfair or arbitrary manner.

The adoption of the “Comprehensive Programme for the Further Extension and Improvement of Cooperation and the Development of Socialist Economic Integration by the CMEA Member-Countries,” to quote the document’s full title, opens a new chapter in the history of the self-styled “Socialist Commonwealth.” Two years on the drawing board, the 25,000-word encyclical is a strange mixture of ideological clichés, abstract formulations of political, economic, and juridical desiderata, projections of distant ends, references to proximate objectives, and elaborations of the concrete ways and means by which the next plateau on the road to the Communist millenium shall be reached. Approved at the 26th session of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) which met July 27-29, 1971, and subsequently ratified by the top political organs of the member states, the program enjoys locally the formal status of a multilateral treaty whose principles validly bind the CMEA partners to a general code of conduct aimed at achieving certain select goals by various designated methods. At the same time it represents a theoretical blueprint of how the leaderships of the countries concerned would like the region’s economic organism to perform in an optimal setting and how they propose to bring that situation about.

Expropriation of property belonging to aliens in foreign countries was unusual prior to World War I. Occasional cases could be found, but such expropriation was always restricted to one or a few owners of property who, for various reasons, came into conflict with a foreign government. Wholesale expropriation of foreign-owned property began on a moderate scale in Mexico in 1915, and was later expanded in that country. Expropriation of all kinds of property, including foreign property, was introduced by Soviet Russia after the 1917 revolution. After World War I some Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, began to expropriate the large agrarian estates of the former German, Austrian, and Hungarian nobility and other rich landowners. These expropriations were, by the terms of the agrarian reform laws, based upon compensation to be paid by the respective states.

The seventh of the Hague conventions bears the title, “Convention relative á la Transformation des Navires de Commerce en Bâtiments de Guerre.” The convention really relates to vessels which have already been converted into war ships rather than to their conversion.

In the Notes and Comments section of the January 1991 issue of the Journal, Professor Richard Lillich presented a thorough and timely analysis of the Soering decision of the European Court of Human Rights, a significant addition to international human rights law. His evaluation of the Soering judgment and his reflections on several of its wider ramifications are especially relevant to the United States military, for the decision constitutes a serious threat to the administration of U.S. military justice overseas and to the treaty relationships between the United States and its NATO allies. A recent European case, Short v. Kingdom of the Netherlands, demonstrates that this threat is far from hypothetical.