Originally published on the CGS blog on March 6, 2015.
We recently celebrated the birthday of Louis Sohn (born 1 March 1914), who played a key role in the development of world law. His Cases and Other Materials on World Law stressed the difference between “international law,” which is born of treaties between two or more States, and “world law,” which is the composition, functions, powers and procedures of organs of the world society.
World Law consists of norms and values which are binding on all States and individuals, regardless of whether a State has ratified a specific treaty. The 1948 Convention against Genocide, for example, is world law even if a State has not ratified it.
Additionally, when a State joins the United Nations, it pledges to follow the norms set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the Declaration as world law is binding on individuals and the administration of States which are not UN members, such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, and what may become States in eastern Ukraine.
Louis Sohn, who died in 2006, would no doubt be following current events in Ukraine with passion. He was born in Lviv, then part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire; the city became part of Poland during his youth and university studies, then part of the Soviet Union and now Ukraine − a testimony to the changing nature of States and nationality.
In addition to having national identity imposed by a place of birth, Sohn was by birth considered a Jew − regardless of what his religious ideas may have been. While he was studying law in Poland, there was social discrimination against Jews, especially in the legal profession. Hoping to study in a country without the same restrictions, he received a fellowship to Harvard Law School in 1939 and was able to leave on a boat two weeks before the German invasion.
Both of his parents, who were medical doctors, were sent to concentration camps. His mother died there, and his father, his health broken by the camp experience, died shortly after the end of the Second World War. Thus, Sohn’s advocacy of human rights as a core of world law was linked to direct experience.
At Harvard Law, he worked as an assistant to Manley O. Hudson, who had been a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice created by the League of Nations. Hudson, as a well-known professor of international law, was asked to be part of the US delegation to draft the UN Charter in San Francisco, and Hudson took Sohn along with him to help with the writing. Sohn worked on the transformation of the Permanent Court of International Justice into the International Court of Justice – similar to the earlier court but now considered an organ of the United Nations.
Sohn, having been present at the birth of the UN, understood both the strength and the limitations of the organization. The San Francisco conference which wrote the Charter in June 1945 worked while the war in the Pacific was still on. Some delegates, in particular those from Australia, were unhappy with the “take it or leave it” presentation of the Charter by the US and UK delegations. Australia insisted that the possibility of a review of the Charter would be on the UN agenda after 10 years of experience in 1955.
With the start of the Cold War and the hot Korean War of 1950, a good number of concerned individuals such as those in the United World Federalists began thinking about what a Charter Review Conference might propose. A prominent New York lawyer with government experience, Grenville Clark, had organized a meeting in 1945 at his home in New Hampshire to study the Charter and he organized in 1953 a new conference in light of a possible 1955 Review.
Clark and Sohn then worked together to write World Peace through World Law, an article-by-article revision of the UN Charter with an emphasis on creating a strong disarmament authority and a UN police force under UN control.
The US and the Soviet Union had collaborated to push a Charter Review Conference in 1955 under the rug in exchange for agreeing to admit a large number of States who were waiting at the door, blocked by Cold War considerations.
Sohn was a pragmatist who continued to work for the transformation of international law into a system of world law based on a common acceptance of values and procedures. He had two main concerns: disarmament and dispute settlement for the new Law of the Sea Treaty. It was around these two major concerns of his that I got to know him and published one of his major essays on disarmament in Transnational Perspectives.
I met him in person in Geneva during a Law of the Sea conference in the 1970s. Sohn was on the US delegation and realized that the extension of national jurisdiction would lead to disputes − as we see these days among China and its neighbors. He worked hard to have dispute settlement procedures written into the treaty. His knowledge and fairness was recognized by many of the delegates, and his suggestions form the base of the dispute settlement procedures.
Sohn saw that world law is a constantly evolving process, based on vision and hope. It is up to us to continue on the path he set out.
