ILC considers a broad scope of international law questions.

ILC considers a broad scope of international law questions

The 34-member International Law Commission, which held its thirty-seventh session at Geneva from 6 May to 26 July, continued efforts towards the codifying of international law on State responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, jurisdictional immunity of States and their property, and offenses against peace and security of mankind.

At the 12-week session, the Commission also considered the status of the diplomatic courier and the diplomatic pouch not accompanied by courier; relations between States and international organizations, and the law of non-navigational uses of international watercourses.

Following the deaths of Robert Q. Quentin-Baxter (New Zealand) on 25 September 1984 and Minister Constantin A. STavropoulos (Greece) on 5 November 1984, and the election on 7 November 1984 of Jens Evensen (Norway) and Ni Zhengyu (China) as Judges of the International Court of Justice, four seats were vacant on the International Law Commission.

Jiahua Huang (China) was elected to fill Mr. Ni's seat; Gaetano Arangio-Ruiz (Italy), Christian Tomuschat (Federal Republic of Germany) and Emmanuel Roukounas (Greec) were elected to the three remaining seats.

Stephen C. McCaffrey was chosen as Special Rapporteur for the topic of the law of the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Judge Evensen.

The International Law Commission, an expert group established by the General Assembly in 1947, drafts articles on various aspects of international law, after which the Assembly may convene an international conference of plenipotentiaries to incorporate the draft articles into multilateral agreements. Commission members serve five-year terms which will expire on 31 December 1986.

State responsibility: The Commission, working towards a final instrument on State responsibility, provisionally adopted a draft article which dealt with a detailed definition of "injured State" with regard to an internationally wrongful act.

Other articles considered by the Commission dealt with the content, forms and degrees of international responsibility--that is, with determining the consequences which an internationally wrongful act of a State might have under international law in different cases (involving reparative and punitive consequences of an internationally wrongful act, relationship between those two types of consequences, and material forms which reparation and sanctions might take).

The provisionally adopted article defines "injured State" as a State "a right of which is infringed by the act of another State, if that act constitutes, in accordance with Part One of the present articles, an internationally wrongful act of that State".

Jurisdictional immunities: In its work on a draft text on jurisdictional immunities, the Commission also provisionally adopted two draft articles on the topic of "Jurisdictional immunities of States and their property": one on state-owned or state-operated ships engaged in commercial service; the other on the effect of an arbitration agreement, dealing with a scope of implied submission to the supervisory jurisdiction of a court of another State.

Draft code of offences: In a report on the draft code of offences against peace and security, the Special Rapporteur presented a possible outline of the future code, and indicated his intention to limit the code now to offences committed by individuals, and to include the offences covered by the 1954 code of offences with appropriate modifications of form and substance. The 1954 draft code was not adopted by the Assembly as it raised problems closely related to that of the definition of aggression. Having approved a definition of aggression in 1974, the Assembly invited the Commission in 1981 to resume work on the code.