The International Court of Justice, in its two successive guises, has on several occasions already had to deal with cases in which its own jurisdiction in the dispute brought before it was at issue. In nearly every instance when its jurisdiction to take cognizance of the merits of a case was challenged, the proceedings were divided, according to a provision in the Court's Rules of Procedure now embodied in Article 62, into a preliminary and a final phase, although such a division is not obligatory in the sense that the defendant party retains its freedom to raise its objections to the Court's jurisdiction not as a preliminary but simultaneously with its defence on the merits.

The purpose of this paper is the comparative study of the jurisdictional functions performed by attachment and garnishment under Belgian and American law. In other words, an attempt will be made to ascertain how and to what extent Belgian and American courts may adjudicate upon claims involving foreigners whose assets are found within their respective jurisdictions.

The author selects three capita selecta with regard to the Insolvency Regulation. He claims that the lex concursus governs the question of whether a third party who claims to have purchased a movable unregistered asset or an asset gratuitously from a person who was subjected to an insolvency proceeding is in fact protected. Furthermore, he reaches the conclusion that the Dutch cooling-off period can have effects in other Member States, provided that some conditions are met. Finally, the author comments on the German Graphic case, in which the Court of Justice of the European Communities has ruled that an action based on a reservation of title against the purchaser who is insolvent is an action in the field of civil and commercial law and is not excluded from the scope of the Brussels I Regulation, and that Article 7(1) of the Insolvency Regulation does not alter this conclusion.

In this article the concept of dwaling will be examined in comparison with the English doctrine of misrepresentation. Dwaling — like misrepresentation — plays a role in the formation of the contract and concerns the intention of the parties to create legal relations. The concept of dwaling under Dutch law has been developed from a traditional ‘defect of the will’, a ‘vice of consent’ where the main emphasis is on the error of the mistaken party, to a legal concept with the emphasis on the false precontractual statement of fact made by the other party or his failure to disclose information. This evolution of dwaling through the years may be traced in s. 6:228 of the new Civil Code (CC) which came into force on 1 January 1992.

Just as in the Fisheries Case (see p. 252 sqq.), a preliminary question as to the real scope of the proceedings might easily have arisen. Theoretically four answers to the problem of territorial sovereignty over the two disputed groups of small Channel islands would have been possible: sovereignty belongs to France; it belongs to Great Britain; the islets constitute a condominium; or they are terra nullius. From the outset the Court, however, took it for granted that the only choice under the Special Agreement of December 29th, 1950, lay as between British and French sovereignty, though it had freedom to come to a different conclusion in regard to either of the two groups. The task entrusted to the Court “to determine whether the sovereignty over the islets and rocks (in so far as they are capable of appropriation) of the Minquiers and Ecrehos groups respectively belongs to the United Kingdom or the French Republic” was thus interpreted by it as being designed to determine “which of the Parties has produced the more convincing proof of title to one or the other of these groups or to both of them.” The adjudication of sovereignty, being essentially an absolute title to a particular territory to the exclusion of, and vis-à-vis all other States, was thereby more or less reduced to the weighing of the respective titles, or at least of the relative probative force of the arguments adduced on either side in support thereof. In this respect the situation was exactly the same as in the case of the Palmas or Miangas island decided in 1928 by Professor Max Huber as sole arbitrator in a suit brought before the Permanent Court of Arbitration by the Netherlands and the United States Governments in virtue of a Special Agreement of 1925 under a previous general Arbitration Treaty of 1908.

Traditionally, Latin American countries have put emphasis in their foreign policy on principles such as national sovereignty, territorial integrity and nonintervention as well as on the primacy of national law and domestic courts. In their relations with Europe and the United States this policy served as a political and legal shield for defending their political and economic independence and their freedom to regulate their own affairs. With respect to the particular issue of foreign investment regulation, it served as the legal foundation for an attempt to subject foreign investors exclusively to the national law and the jurisdiction of the courts of the country in which they invest or operate. Thus, each Latin American country sought to equate foreign investors and its own nationals for the purpose of investment regulation. Therefore, this policy is also called the ‘national standard’. It is closely associated with the name of the nineteenth-century Argentinian lawyer, Carlos Calvo.

On sait qu'aux premières pages de son livre, Savigny pose que l'on pourrait tout aussi bien—sinon mieux!—résoudre les conflits de lois en répondant à la question de savoir quel droit doit être appliqué aux rapports de droit (internationaux) qu'en partant des règles de droit. Les statutistes partent en majeure partie (bien que non entièrement) de la domination des règles de droit; pour Savigny c'est le rapport de droit qui vient en premier lieu. (Bien que parfois il ne dédaignât pas de faire appel au caractère d'une règle comme statut personnel ou réel).

In the following pages I intend to survey the judgments of the International Court of Justice pronounced in the course of 1959.

Owing to the differing degrees of importance from the legal point of view of the individual cases dealt with, their discussion will necessarily vary in length and thoroughness.

The market impact of the Convention on civil litigation in the six original Member States was a matter of concern with several speakers. It was stressed in particular that the mere solution of jurisdictional problems may require extensive research of substantive issues, which possibly could lead to litigation at three national levels. If the possibility of submitting preliminary questions under the 1971 Protocol to the EC Court at Luxemburg is also taken into account, five judgments could even be required to settle the question which court in the Common Market is competent. Although perhaps inspiring lawyers' intellectual efforts, this situation would unfortunately increase the litigation costs to the parties. Moreover, the final text of the EC Draft on the law applicable to contractual and non-contractual obligations is progressing and the EC Court will be charged with ensuring the uniform interpretation of this convention as well. One can imagine questions being put to the European Court in each of the three stages of a dispute, viz., the jurisdiction phase, the applicable law, and the enforcement in another Member State.

On April 1999, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (hereinafter: the Vienna Convention, CISG or the Convention)2 celebrated its 19th anniversary. The Convention has been praised throughout the world as a skillful and effective tool for governing international sales transactions. Hence, after more than fifty years of arduous work, the efforts undertaken to unify the law for international sales at a global scale seem, at last, to have reached success. As frequet referrals to former efforts undertaken will be made, it seems appropriate to set forth, at least summarily, the history of the Vienna Convention.

International law has long recognized the right to vote in elections as a fundamental democratic right and the act of voting as the most basic form of popular participation. In post-conflict African countries as well as those struggling to make the transition from single-party autocratic rule to multiparty democracies, competitive elections have become the barometer for measuring how close they are to this goal. Yet, across Africa this internationally-protected right to vote is under siege as elections have been transformed into elaborately staged events designed to hoodwink external donors. Rather than serving as a measure of democratic participation, the act of voting in a disturbingly sizeable number of African countries has been used by cynical political leaders to provide their authoritarian regimes with a veneer of legitimacy. Despite these hiccups, this article argues that a careful review of state practice in the continent reveals an emerging regional customary law norm in support of the right to popular participation.