The object of the present article is to survey the problems and to assess the achievements and prospects of the codification of international law within the United Nations in the light of the ...experience of the first five years of the activity of the International Law Commission. The Charter, in Article 13, imposes upon the General Assembly the obligation to “initiate studies and to make recommendations … for the purpose of encouraging the progressive development of international law and its codification.” In pursuance of that article the General Assembly set up the International Law Commission and adopted a Statute regulating its functions and organization. The first session of the Commission took place in 1949. Since then, it has been meeting in yearly sessions lasting between eight and eleven weeks.
The cause célèbre of King v. William Joyce, subsequently reported as Joyce v. Director of Public Prosecutions, was concerned to a large extent with matters of interest for international law, and it ...is mainly from this point of view that it is proposed to discuss it in the present article. Obviously the case is also of considerable importance both for criminal law, in so far as it is concerned with the crime of treason, and for constitutional law inasmuch as it bears directly on the question of the nature and the obligations of allegiance. However, it is probable that the case books which will claim it most insistently will be those of international law. For the decision in Rex v. Joyce is not only an authority on certain aspects of allegiance owed by aliens and of the right of a State to assume jurisdiction over acts committed by aliens abroad. It sheds light on such questions as the nature of diplomatic protection of citizens, the right of a State to protect diplomatically persons who are not its citizens, the obligation of allegiance of so-called protected persons, and some others. Not all these questions were judicially answered, but they loomed large in argument and imparted to the proceedings the complexion of a case concerned predominantly with international law. In view of this it may be pertinent to preface this article by drawing attention to a point which appears to be a mere matter of terminology but which, it is believed, raises an issue of wider significance.
The first phase of the dispute between China and Japan before the League of Nations began in September, 1931, when China, following upon the invasion of Manchuria by Japanese troops, invoked Article ...11 of the Covenant and asked the Council to take measures to restore the territorial status quo and to determine the amount and the character of the compensation due to her as the result of the invasion of her territory. It ended in April, 1933, when, subsequently to the adoption by the Assembly of a report under Article 15 of the Covenant, it became clear that no effective action would be taken to implement the purposes of the Covenant. The charter of the community of nations organized in and through the League proved, to all appearances, to be of illusory value in its fundamental aspect, namely, in the undertaking to protect the members of the League from external violence and aggression. The prediction of the sceptics that the authority of the League would be unable to assert itself if challenged by one of the Great Powers seemed to have been amply confirmed. It seemed to have been fulfilled by a successful defiance of the Covenant so unprecedented in its magnitude, obviousness and persistence as to constitute a fair test case of the value and of the potentialities of the League.
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