Following the First World War, a group of lawyers and diplomats drafted the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice. Ever since, the Statute of the World Court has contained an article (Article 38) which indicates the rules the Court should apply when it administers the law. Since that time the complexity of international society has increased considerably, and the need for speedy production of rules of international law has also grown very conspicuously, consequent upon the ever-increasing interdependence of the more than 160 states which are now the main producers of that law. In these circumstances, it seems to me to be of importance to state in as plain terms as possible how international law is made.

In the wake of the “decade” of decolonization – roughly the fifties and early sixties of this century – from time to time the world still faces the legal and political problems which result from the process of political emancipation of hitherto non-self-governing territories.

What is the legal nature of the rights granted by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)? This question seems simple enough, and every lawyer interested in the international protection of human rights is likely to have come to ponder it at one time or another. Before the Second World War, the international protection of economic and social rights was mainly the concern of the ILO, with its own very specific techniques and procedures. Apart from that, the question of social rights had gained the attention only of some academics. After the War, economic and social rights were included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 22–29), though that is not a binding instrument. There is also, of course, the European Social Charter, concluded in 1961, and in force since 26 February 1965, which is a regional treaty. Since the entry into force of the ICESCR on 3 January 1976, however, there is now a binding and global instrument dealing with the protection of what are generally called “social rights” (in contradisctinction to “civil and political rights”).

As set out in section II of this paper, the Diplomatic Conference, by adopting Article 48 of Protocol I, reaffirmed the principle of distinction “between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives”. The obligation to make this distinction serves, as the Article states, “to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects”. As a logical consequence of this obligation, the Article lays down that the Parties to the conflict “accordingly shall direct their military operations only against military objectives”.