U.K. Arbitrators Deciding Owner Of Andes Area

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30947, 31 December 1965, Page 13

U.K. Arbitrators Deciding Owner Of Andes Area

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright)

LONDON, Dec. 30. Three Englishmen—an international lawyer, an expert geographer, and a soldier —have started work in London on the delicate task of deciding whether Argentina or Chile owns a fragment of the vast South American continent. They are arbitrating in a disagreement which is the remains of a bigger dispute over the 3000-mile long frontier which the two countries share. The choice of British arbitrators harks back more than half a century, to the days when Queen Victoria was regarded as the world’s most powerful and just sovereign. In the last few years of her reign Britain was asked to settle a border dispute between the Argentine and Chile. She died a year before the decision was announced,

in 1902, when her son Edward VII was on the Throne. The new frontier issue, referred to Britain about a year ago by both Argentina and Chile, concerns the last disputed 40 miles in the Cordillera of the southern Andes in the Palena river area.

So a quarrel over territory started in the days of Queen Victoria is being finally settled with her great-great grand-daughter, Queen Elizabeth, on the Throne.

The three-man British court of arbitration began its hearing into the dispute in a small white-walled room in a tall London building where normally disputes over music copyright are heard. The president of the court is 70-year-old Lord McNair (family motto: Danger in Delay) one of Britain’s greatest authorities on international law. Much of his life has been spent on committees and boards of investigation. He served on the International Court of Justice, of which he is a former president for nine years. In 1959 he became one of the first judges

of the Court of Human Rights set up by the Council of Europe.

The other two members of the court are Mr L. P. Kirwan, director and secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and Brigadier K. M. Papworth, former director of map production, ordnance survey. . The registrar or rapporteur is Professor D. H. M. Johnson, London University’s professor of international and air law.

Lord McNair and his colleagues have already conferred with representatives of the Argentinian and Chilean Governments and received their written claims to the disputed territory with relevant maps. Two British officials left for Buenos Aires on November 25—about two weeks after a Chilean policeman had been killed in a clash with an Argentinian border patrol—to prepare for an aerial survey. A team of British experts will go out to South America next month to carry out the aar survey of the disputed territory, and another survey on the ground.