Text of a speech, delivered on 16 February 1978 at a meeting of the Volkenrechtelijk Dispuut “Cedant Arma Togae” of the University of Utrecht.

When the Security Council adopted fully mandatory and comprehensive sanctions against Southern Rhodesia in May 1968, it simultaneously created a new Committee. This so-called Watchdog Committee, according to the text of the resolution, was charged with examining the reports on the implementation of the resolution submitted by the Secretary General and with seeking information from States Members of the United Nations and of the specialized agencies. The information sought could relate to the trade of a state – even to the trade exempted from prohibition in the resolution – and to activities by nationals or in the territories of a state that might constitute an evasion of sanctions as the Committee might consider necessary for the proper discharge of its duty to report to the Security Council.

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690, exerted a profound influence upon such great instruments on human rights as: The American Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776; The French Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 26 August 1789; The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948; and The International Covenants on Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 16 December 1966. The reflection of many ideas contained in the Two Treatises of Government in these Instruments on human rights is so obvious that it would be no exaggeration to say that Locke is their spiritual father, although so far this credit is not yet given to him explicitly.

The main purpose of the paper is to investigate the differences between the new international economic order (NIEO) advocated by the overwhelming majority of the members of the General Assembly and the existing order. To what extent are changes called for in the institutional and substantial legal rules that help to mould international economic relations on a world scale? Attention is paid especially to the principles on which these rules are based and to the modifications thereof that would be required for bringing about the NIEO.

The international discussion about a new world economic order, which has been going on for many years now, has been complicated by the absence of clear and generally accepted ideas about the main features of such a concept. The word “order” itself has a wide variety of different meanings (e.g., natural versus imposed order) and in some quarters the mere terminology of “NIEO” has provoked opposition. Thus confusion, and sometimes suspicion, have contributed to hampering rational analysis and conclusions.

The question whether decisions of English courts dealing with points of international law should be regarded as binding precedents has never been authoritatively decided. One view regards a rule of international law, once incorporated by the decision of an English court, as part of municipal law to which the doctrine of stare decisis must apply in the same manner as to a rule of purely domestic origin. Lord Atkin's famous statement in Chung Chi Cheung v. The King is sometimes put forward as necessitating this conclusion:

“It must be always remembered that, so far, at any rate, as the courts of this country are concerned, international law has no validity save in so far as its principles are accepted and adopted by our domestic law. There is no external power that imposes its rules upon our own code of substantive law or procedure. The courts acknowledge the existence of a body of rules which nations accept amongst themselves. On any judicial issue they seek to ascertain what the relevant rule is, and, having found it, they will treat it as incorporated into the domestic law, so far as it is not inconsistent with rules enacted by statutes or finally declared by their tribunals.”