At the Imperial Conference of 1926, the participating British governments agreed that the Dominions and Great Britain “ are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”

This Note summarizes the judicial work of the International Court of Justice during 1997, using the updated General List, pleadings filed, Orders and Judgments given and hearings held at the Peace Palace in The Hague to describe the Court’s current record.

By an order in council issued on the 4th of August, 1914, the British Government announced a list of articles which it proposed to treat as contraband “during the war with the German Emperor”; by an order of August 12th the first mentioned order was extended to the war with “the Emperor of Austria—King of Hungary,” and by an order of September 21st certain additions were made to the list of contraband articles published in the two preceding orders. By an order in council of October 29th the list of contraband articles in the earlier proclamations was withdrawn in consequence of the complaint of the Swedish Government that it included metallic ores, which were on the free list in the Declaration of London, and that the treatment of such articles as contraband would seriously injure Swedish trade. A new list was therefore substituted, from which ores were omitted.

On February 4, 1915, the German Admiralty published the following decree:

It would not be possible to understand, much less to state clearly, the origin, nature, and extent of the so-called Doctrine of Continuous Voyages without explaining, even in a succinct manner, the causes that contributed to the statement of this famous principle. There is hardly anything in the field of social conceptions that is not in some way or other connected with the past. For this reason when we want to ascertain the principles that obtained in a period gone by it is imperatively necessary that our inquiries should start from an age even more remote, so that the light of history may clear the paths that we intend to explore. During the middle of the eighteenth century nothing was heard of the doctrine which we attempt now to expound; it was only at the end of that century that its first manifestations appeared. But the examination of the navigation laws of the times and of the principles of international law that regulated the intercourse between neutrals and belligerents would at once suggest that the prohibition which the doctrine embraced is dependent on or complementary to the so-called “Rule of war of 1756.”