THE WEEK

From Professor Gerhart Niemeyer, a new slogan:

If we lived in a world that had traditions in common, we would sympathize with a recent report of a committee of the American Bar Association asking that the United States drop its reservation to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice which sits at The Hague. Theoretically, the Bar Association is quite correct when it observes that impartial justice among nations is hardly compatible with the Connally Amendment of 1946, which stipulates that the U.S. shall have the power to veto any International Court action on problems that can be interpreted as coming within the “domestic jurisdiction” of the nation. From the standpoint of realism, however, the Bar Association request falls several light-years short of making sense. Since it is an arm of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice adheres to no common tradition; its members, by definition, are representative of two basically incompatible systems of morality. If the Connally reservation has a “fundamental evil,” as the Bar Association committee report insists, the “law” of the United Nations has even more basic defects. A UN which could not muster the decency to oust the Soviet Union after the Hungarian blood bath, and which still welcomes the fraudulent Soviet stooge delegation from a coerced Budapest, cannot be accepted. as an arbiter of anybody’s law or morality. In the past, the ABA has evidenced a commonsense realization of the nature of the international jungle. One wonders what has got into the committee members.

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From Professor Gerhart Niemeyer, a new slogan:

If we lived in a world that had traditions in common, we would sympathize with a recent report of a committee of the American Bar Association asking that the United States drop its reservation to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice which sits at The Hague. Theoretically, the Bar Association is quite correct when it observes that impartial justice among nations is hardly compatible with the Connally Amendment of 1946, which stipulates that the U.S. shall have the power to veto any International Court action on problems that can be interpreted as coming within the “domestic jurisdiction” of the nation. From the standpoint of realism, however, the Bar Association request falls several light-years short of making sense. Since it is an arm of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice adheres to no common tradition; its members, by definition, are representative of two basically incompatible systems of morality. If the Connally reservation has a “fundamental evil,” as the Bar Association committee report insists, the “law” of the United Nations has even more basic defects. A UN which could not muster the decency to oust the Soviet Union after the Hungarian blood bath, and which still welcomes the fraudulent Soviet stooge delegation from a coerced Budapest, cannot be accepted. as an arbiter of anybody’s law or morality. In the past, the ABA has evidenced a commonsense realization of the nature of the international jungle. One wonders what has got into the committee members.