Volume 20, Issue 1

Airborne pollution of the marine environment has not received great attention in the literature. This is certainly a reflection of the fact that, for the longest time, this type of pollution was neglected in international efforts to cooperate for the protection of the marine environment. However, the last few years have witnessed considerable activity in this area and some stock-taking is in order.

The first feature that catches the eye when the Baltic is compared with other regions of the world is that the Baltic Sea area clearly distinguishes itself by the unusual combination of two elements. On the one hand, it is surrounded by nine countries adhering to different political as well as economic systems. On the other hand, apart from a relatively short segment south and southeast of the island of Bornholm between Denmark and Poland, a maritime boundary has been agreed upon in all other areas, at least if one disregards the trijunction points connecting these different lines. In the overwhelming majority of cases, moreover, a single maritime boundary has been established (continental shelf as well as fishery and economic zone). Some doubt may exist with respect to the German-Danish boundary, but the only real exception to this rule is the most southern stretch of the continental shelf delimitation line between Finland and Sweden (West and South of Bogskar), where the municipal legislation of both countries concerning the outer limits of their respective fishery zones corresponds neither inter se nor with respect to the continental shelf boundary. Negotiations on this topic have been initiated between the parties during the fall of 1989. As of today, these negotiations have not yet resulted in a new bilateral boundary agreement. It should also be noted that in all cases of adjacency the territorial sea has been delimited.

Since the December 1968 General Assembly's resolution in which for the first time the United Nations admitted the linkage between environmental protection and human rights and expressed concern that environmental changes could have various (negative) implications for basic human rights, this question has been vividly discussed on many occasions.

When discussing the subject of access to “the secondary literature” in European law, it is desirable to define terms as precisely as possible. I am limiting my observations to those media providing this access on a transnational basis, rather than strictly national bibliographical publications. In actual practice, this is not much of a limitation, since legal bibliography at the national level is only constrained by language, and the subjects treated frequently cross jurisdictional boundaries and concepts. A further, and more applicable, delimiter for “secondary literature” is to journal articles; that is to say, articles and materials appearing in serial publications of varying degrees of frequency; thus, one excludes monographic literature.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 44/25 on November 20, 1989 was last reported in this column in the Winter of 1990 (IJLI, v. 18, no. 3). As noted then, the Convention entered into force on September 2, 1990. The initial documentation of the States parties to the Convention and the Committee on the Rights of the Child now provide additional information. These documents carry the words “Convention on the Rights of the Child” on the upper left corner of the cover pages and the new symbol “CRC” on the top of the upper right corner. The first documents noted emanate from the first meeting of the States parties to the Convention which opened at UN headquarters on February 27, 1991. The initial document, a single-page item carrying the symbol CRC/SP/1, dated November 30, 1990, is the provisional agenda of the first meeting.