On June 14, 1993, just one year after an arbitral tribunal fixed the maritime boundary around the small French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, off Canada's Newfoundland, the International Court of Justice rendered its judgment on a closely analogous case concerning anew a relatively small insular feature lying opposite a much lengthier continental coast. A marked disparity in coastal fronts once more controlled the geographical context, so that proportionality was elevated by one of the parties to a dominant legal presumption. Yet again, equidistance crossed swords with equity, but hopefully suffered little from the Court's familiar ‘shadowboxing’ against Article 6 of the 1958 Continental Shelf Convention. One of the root causes of the dispute, the capelin fishing ground (capelin is a migratory species abundant in the areas between Jan Mayen, Iceland and Greenland), was shared out in equal halves, the judgment sending strong echoes of distributive justice in this respect. As for the boundary line, the Court evinced afresh its inventiveness with a view to equally apportioning satisfaction. The judgment marks a most-welcome rapprochement of Article 6 and equitable principles discourse, an affirmed restoration of equidistance, and a victory for often victimized small islands. Proportionality, as a test of the equitability of the solution, was ignored and seems now to have completed its life cycle. The Court's decision also amounted to what may be termed a premiere. Indeed, this is the first maritime delimitation case heard by the Court on the basis of a unilateral application relying on declarations under Article 36 paragraph 2 of the Statute.

Today, Machiavelli's words have lost none of their accuracy. Population transfer still serves as an effective means to secure the fruits of conquest or aggression to the detriment of the civilian population. With nationalist sentiments rising alarmingly, population transfer is bound to be one of the issues figuring high on the international agenda in the decade to come.

The Third Amendment to the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (‘the Fund’) became effective on 11 November 1992. The amendment concerns a modification of Article XXVI of the Articles of Agreement of the Fund (‘the Articles of Agreement’ or ‘the Fund Agreement’) so as to confer the Fund with the power to suspend the voting rights of a member failing to fulfil ‘any of its obligations’ under the Fund Agreement. It is a known fact that this move was motivated by the problem of persistent overdue financial obligations to the Fund. Indeed, the first application of this new power involved the suspension of Sudan's voting rights on account of this country's failure to meet its financial obligations to the Fund (August 1993). Sudan had been in arrears as regards its financial obligations to the Fund since July 1984.