Afro-Asian Jurists and the Quest to Modernise the International Protection of Foreign-Owned Property, 1955–1975

Abstract

In the two decades following the 1955 Asian African Conference in Bandung, Asian and African jurists sought to reshape international law to better incorporate the aspirations of formerly colonised peoples. The Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC), founded one year after the Bandung Conference, helped formulate a common Afro-Asian and Third World international legal agenda by bringing together jurists and ideologically diverse Asian and African governments while collaborating with UN institutions working to codify and develop international law. The AALCC’s work and the contemporaneous writings of African and Asian jurists reveal a shared ambition to weaken the international protection of foreign-owned property by pursuing a legal agenda anchored in the structure and principles of the post-World War II international legal system. The Afro-Asian international legal agenda combined efforts to eliminate pre-war rules incompatible with the foundational principles of the UN Charter while elaborating the content of these principles through UN institutions.