By T. O. Elias

Published by Sijthoff & Noordhoff, Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands, and Oceana Publications Inc., Dobbs

Ferry, New York

(1979, xxii and 260 pp. No price given)

In his foreword to “New Horizons in International Law”, Judge Elias tells the reader that: “This book consists of a series of studies designed to highlight a number of the more significant aspects of public international law that have emerged during the past thirty years or so”. The 11 chapters are organised in three parts.

Part I on “Certain aspects of the new trends” consists of four chapters on New Horizons in International Law; the Contribution of Asia and Africa to Contemporary International Law; the Law of Treaties in Retrospect; and the New Law of the Sea— An Outline Report. The remaining two Parts are rather more homogeneous, dealing respectively with “The ICJ and the Judicial Process” and “Human Rights and Humanitarian Law”.

Coming from the pen of a Judge of the International Court of Justice, this is a disappointing and somewhat lightweight collection of essays. The “trends” or “horizons” identified are clear to every observer of international relations and the reader will derive few new insights from this treatment of them. The fact that there is little internal coherence in this work and that it is sewn together by the exceedingly thin thread of “new horizons” would have been a matter of little concern if the individual chapters had embodied fresh thinking or stimulating argument. Regrettably, it has to be said that most of these studies are rather superficial. It may be unfair to select for particular comment Chapter 4 on the Law of the Sea but this is perhaps the chapter which will be of most interest to readers of this Journal. It is difficult to understand why it was thought necessary to include such an essay in a book published in 1979. It is hard enough for anyone to present a worthwhile outline report on the very complex proceedings of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) in a mere 13 pages. Its usefulness, however, is further reduced by the fact that it is now about three years out of date, Judge Elias’s comments being made on the work of UNCLOS III only down to the Fifth Session ending in September, 1976.

Elsewhere in the book, the reader finds too often that questions on which the author’s views would have been interesting are raised only to be put aside. Thus,