Summary

Description

The Office of the Legal Adviser publishes the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law to provide the public with a historical record of the views and practice of the Government of the United States in public and private international law. In his April 2003 introduction to the 1989-1990 Digest, then Legal Adviser William H. Taft IV stated in part: "The year 1989-90 was a transitional period in international relations, as the world community continued to deal with implications of the end of the Cold War and the unsteady emergence of a new era. Many of the tensions and ambiguities of the time are reflected in the documents excerpted in this volume. For example, the Immigration Act of 1990 was adopted against the background of domestic U.S. concerns about terrorism, admission of refugees and exclusion of aliens-issues that continue to be important today. Other significant domestic law issues involved reservations to treaties (in this case, the 1948 Genocide Convention), the application of doctrines of foreign sovereign immunity (the Wallenberg Case), the interplay between sanctions and foreign assistance (e.g., Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic), and the allocation of foreign affairs authority in our federal system. "At the same time, the volume records U.S. efforts to deal effectively with the legal dimensions of very diverse issues on the international plane, including the Iraqi attack on the U.S.S. Stark, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, the deployment of U.S. armed forces in Panama, maritime interdiction incidents, irregular rendition of criminal suspects, and the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Concerns about human rights, terrorism, and the war on drugs are indicated by the adoption of domestic legislation implementing, or relating to the implementation of, the UN Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.