r in regard to which the law has not yet been sufficiently developed in the practice of States."
The need for a more coherent formulation of international law was apparent to the founding members of the United Nations in 1945 in view of previous experience, including the widespread flouting of international law and civilized norms of human conduct witnessed during World War II, including among other things the Holocaust and widespread violations of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. The movement to achieve greater uniformity in international law and to achieve global consensus concerning certain minimum standards of state conduct dates back to the 19th century. The first Geneva Convention (in 1864) dealt with the treatment of sick and wounded members of armed forces. The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 resulted in Conventions on the law of war and neutrality. However, Sinclair said "the first major official effort to grapple with the problems of the codification of international law in general (as opposed to specific aspects of international law) followed the establishment in 1924, by the Council of the League of Nations of the Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law." That Committee, which is the predecessor organization of ILC, produced the draft Hague Codification Conference of 1930 which dealt with among other things certain questions relating to the conflict among different nationality laws, but Sinclair said it "achieved only meagre results," owing to the burgeoning differences among the great powers in the early 1930s.
Article 2 of the ILC statute provides that its members "shall be persons of recognized competence in international law." In other words, the General Assembly in electing members is supposed to select them for their professional legal expertise and they serve on the Commission not as representatives of governments of the states from which...