Preliminary Thoughts Towards an International Convention on Terrorism

The first concerted efforts at international control of terrorism were engendered by the increase in terrorist activity following World War I. An early manifestation of this concern was a series of meetings held under the auspices of the International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in the late twenties and early thirties. These meetings, attended by delegations representing states and both intergovernmental and private international organizations, served to focus attention on the subject. As in earlier years, some extradition treaties were revised to exclude certain terrorist acts from the category of "political offenses," thereby making them extraditable.' The assassination at Marseilles on October 9, 1934, of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Mr. Louis Barthou, Foreign Minister of the French Republic, led to a request to the Council of the League of Nations for an enquiry into the circumstances.2 The Council passed a resolution stating "that the rules of international law concerning the repression of terrorist activity are not at present sufficiently precise to guarantee efficiently international co-operation in this matter," and decided to establish "a Committee of experts to study this question with a view to drawing up a preliminary draft of an international convention to assure the repression of conspiracies or crimes committed with a political and terrorist purpose." 3