Abstract
There is an elementary principle of international law that a State may claim immunity from legal action in the courts of another State in respect of its strictly governmental activities carried on in that other State. This is laid down in the case of The Parliament Belge (1880) 5 P.C. 197 in which the Court of Appeal held that it could not exercise jurisdiction in the case where there was a collision in the English Channel between a ship, owned by the King of the Belgians and employed partly for carrying mails and partly for trading purposes, and a British vessel.
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References
See Lady Hazel Fox’s interesting article “State Immunity: The House of Lords’ Decision in I Congreso del Partido,” Law Quarterly Review,January 1982, pp. 94–108.
As Lord Denning pointed out, he himself accepted this doctrine of transformation without question in Thakrar v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (1974 2 All E.R. 261 at 266) (1974 QB 684 at 701).
Reference was made to Lauterpacht’s article entitled, “The Problem of Jurisdictional Immunities of Foreign States,” (1951) 28 British Yearbook of International Law,pp. 220–272.
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© 1983 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Elias, T.O. (1983). Sovereign immunity and commercial transactions. In: The International Court of Justice and some contemporary problems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4865-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4865-0_9
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