On the night of Sunday 27—Monday 28 April 1958, the curtain fell on a diplomatic performance on the Geneva scene which had lasted for nine weeks: the Conference on the Law of the Sea. Driving back to the hotel from the Palais des Nations one could not help comparing the result of this Conference held under the aegis of the United Nations with the corresponding section of its predecessor of 1930 at The Hague, organised by the League of Nations, and being struck by two parallels and two differences. The two Conferences had in common that they had both been thoroughly prepared legally, and that it proved impossible to reach any agreement on one of the fundamental questions discussed, viz. the breadth of the territorial sea. But they differed in that, as far as the law of the sea was concerned, the Geneva Conference covered a much wider field than that of The Hague as it dealt not only with the territorial sea but also with the high seas and the continental shelf, and that they drew different conclusions from their failure to reach agreement on the breadth of the territorial sea, because while the Conference of 1930 ended with no convention at all concerning this subject, its successor of 1958 adopted one in spite of the important gaps left. The Conference of 1958 was moreover attended by a much larger number of States.
