The Office of the Legal Adviser is pleased to announce the publication of the Digest of United States Practice in International Law for calendar years 1989-1990. In order to assist readers in locating the full text of documents that are excerpted in the 1989-1990 Digest but readily accessible elsewhere, the volume includes citations to Internet or other public sources. As with current year volumes, this listing contains documents not otherwise readily available. Not surprisingly, electronic sources exist for far fewer of these older documents. Nevertheless, we have created electronic versions for as many of them as possible. Some documents, such as telegrams, proved to be too costly to prepare in compliance with regulations on government Internet postings. We believe, however, that the excerpts in the book are sufficiently extensive so that this omission will not present any real problems for the reader.
In his Introduction to the 1989-1990 Digest, William H. Taft, IV, Legal Adviser for the Department of State, commented:
This volume of the now-revived Digest of U.S. Practice in International Law is a kind of ?legal prequel.? As many users of the Digest know, the previous series of volumes covered the years 1973 though 1988, after which publication was suspended for over a decade. The first volume of the current series was issued just a year and half ago, covering calendar year 2000. The 2001 Digest followed quickly. The editors have now turned their efforts to filling in the ?gap? between 1988 and 2000, while maintaining their commitment to produce current annual volumes in a timely fashion (the 2002 Digest is already in production). This volume, for 1989-90, represents the first step in that ?catch up? process. The material included herein remains topical and, in many instances, still timely. The year 1989-90 was a transitional period in international relations, as the world community continued to deal with implications of the end of the Cold War and the unsteady emergence of a new era. Many of the tensions and ambiguities of the time are reflected in the documents excerpted in this volume. For example, the Immigration Act of 1990 was adopted against the background of domestic U.S. concerns about terrorism, admission of refugees and exclusion of aliens -- issues that continue to be important today.
Other significant domestic law issues involved reservations to treaties (in this case, the 1948 Genocide Convention); the application of doctrines of foreign sovereign immunity (the Wallenberg Case); the interplay between sanctions and foreign assistance (e.g., Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic); and the allocation of foreign affairs authority in our federal system. At the same time, the volume records U.S. efforts to deal effectively with the legal dimensions of very diverse issues on the international plane, including the Iraqi attack on the U.S.S. Stark; the downing of Iran Air Flight 655; the deployment of U.S. armed forces in Panama; maritime interdiction incidents; irregular rendition of criminal suspects; and the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe.
Concerns about human rights, terrorism, and the war on drugs are indicated by the adoption of domestic legislation implementing, or relating to the implementation of, the UN Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances; the Montreal Protocol on Suppression of Unlawful Acts of Violence at Airports; and the IMO Convention on the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (negotiated in the aftermath of the Achille Lauro incident) and its related Protocol on Fixed Platforms. The aim of the Office of the Legal Adviser in renewing publication of the Digest, and particularly in reaching back in time to fill in the missing years, remains to provide practitioners, scholars and the public, as well as governmental officials, with ready access to documents and other information regarding U.S. views and actions in the most important areas of international law.
The current volume has been edited by Margaret Pickering, Sally Cummins and David Stewart of this Office. Work is under way on additional volumes covering the years 1991 through 1999, and on current years. The 2002 Digest should be available in January 2004.
The Digest of U.S. Practice in International Law for calendar years 1989-1990, as well as for calendar years 2000, 2001 and 2002, is available for purchase from the International Law Institute, The Foundry Building, 1055 Thomas Jefferson St.NW,, Washington, DC 20007. Contact Peter Whitten, Director of Publishing, at (202) 247-6006.
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