The International Court of Justice had a relatively busy year in 1952. The judges were in continuous session at The Hague from May 5 to August 27,1952; judgments were given in the Anibatielos Case between Greece and the United Kingdom (on a preliminary objection), in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case between the United Kingdom and Iran (on a preliminary objection), and in the Case Concerning Bights of Nationals of the United States of America in Morocco between France and the United States. At the end of the year three cases were pending: the Amhatielos Case, the Minquiers and Ecrehos Case between the United Kingdom and France, and the Notteiohm Case between Liechtenstein and Guatemala.

A well-known English judge declared three decades ago that “an alien ami is never exlex . . . whatever rights he has he can enforce by law just as an ordinary subject can.” Nor was this a new thought at that time. More than a hundred years earlier a prominent American judge had affirmed that:

The implementation of Article 18 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was designed to usher in a new era of open diplomacy, may be regarded as one of the more successful achievements of that organization. This fact may be evidenced by the decision of the drafters of the Charter of the United Nations to continue the practice of registration and publication of treaties which had been developed under the aegis of the League. The delegates at San Francisco, in setting up a new system to regulate this practice, were concerned, among other things, to avoid the difficulties which had arisen in connection with the interpretation of Article 18 generally, and in particular with the interpretation of the terms “ treaty”and “ international engagement” which appear therein. Article 102 of the Charter, which reads as follows, was the result of their efforts: