Disarmament Debates around the 1899 Hague Peace Conference and the 1921–1922 Washington Conference: Community-Oriented Aspirations and Individual Security Concerns

When disarmament started to interest the major states and international lawyers at around the time of the 1899 Hague Conference, two distinct positions concerning the law of disarmament became apparent: proponents and opponents. The proponents, with their community-oriented aspirations, found much merit in establishing the law of disarmament, while the opponents, with their individual security concerns, saw nothing but negative consequences for such a possibility. Given these two forces in the disarmament debate, one could wonder how the 1921–1922 Washington Conference was able to produce a treaty limiting the naval armament. This article tries to show that the Washington Naval Treaty was different from the law of disarmament that the proponents had envisioned, and that it was made possible by carefully crafted provisions to limit its own impact on the security of the naval powers.

The United States and Human Rights Marginalization at the International Court of Justice, 1945–1950

Using the 1950 International Court of Justice (ICJ) Paris Peace Treaties advisory opinions as a vantage point, this articles explores the changing attitude of the American government towards the emerging United Nations human rights regime and the latter became entangled in Cold War politics. The first part situates the contribution of this article within the postwar human rights historiography. The second part explores how US legal advisors constructed arguments destined to insulate the American domestic legal system from the alleged domestic disruptive effects of the new human rights. The final section delves into the cases of Cardinal Mindszenty of Budapest and Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb, and how they reverberated at the ICJ. It argues that US legal advisors sought to turn the human rights violations that triggered the judicial proceedings into violations of treaty provisions. In the process, the ICJ validated this transformation and, thus contributed, to marginalizing the emerging United Nations human rights regime.