`Chaos or Civilisation?' EE5 'TO 111 RHIVE
From: Judge Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, A. M. Burdon-Cooper, W. K. Stead, Richard Harman, R. E. Griffin, Sir Anthony Wagner, Commander Martin Pares, RN, R. Charles Liebman.
SIR,—In your issue of February 10, over the imprint of the Republic of South Africa, there appears a full-page statement entitled 'Chaos or Civilisation?' which contains an account of South Africa's ad- ministration of the territory of South West Africa placed under the Republic's mandate by the former League of Nations. After referring to 'a political campaign . . . mounted in an attempt to discredit South Africa's administration,' the statement con- tinues with the following passage:
As part of this campaign, Ethiopia and Liberia in 1960 initiated litigation against South Africa in the International Court of Justice. The protracted proceedings developed, however, com- pletely in South Africa's favour and in July 1966 the Court rejected all the Applicant States' claims against the Republic.
While this passage is technically correct on its wording, it is liable, in the context in which it occurs, to give a seriously misleading impression to anyone who has not read, or is not otherwise fully con- versant with, the judgment of the court, and also to exhibit the judgment itself in a false light.
In actual fact, the judgment neither accepted nor rejected the substance of the various charges of violations of the mandate made against the Republic of South Africa. It simply did not deal with them. What it did was to find that under the League of Nations mandates system, and according to the con- stitution and practice of the League, the mandatory's obligations were owed to the League itself as an entity, and not to each and every one of the member states individually. The judgment further found that upon the dissolution of the League in 1946, the various rights which it had possessed did not devolve upon the individual member states. In consequence, it was held that the two applicant states were not legally in a position to prefer the charges they were making, and that for this reason their claims must fail. The judgment therefore concluded that 'the Applicants cannot be considered to have established any legal right or interest appertaining to them in the subject-matter of the present claims, and that, accordingly, the Court must decline to give effect to them'
It was on this basis and this basis alone that the claims of the applicant states were rejected. The substance of these claims was not gone into by the judgment, since the result must be the same so far as the applicants were concerned, whether the charges they made were justified or not. Hence the court made no pronouncement about these, either in the one sense or in the other.
GERALD FITZMAURICE
International Court of Justice, The Hague
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