Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1939, Page 470
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LE NORD
to communicate such demands to merchant vessels and leave it
to them to decide whether, for the sake of convenience or for
other reasons, they will adopt the methods recommended by the
belligerents.
Action by the British and French Governments has been re-
stricted in the main, as far as Finland is concerned, to recommend-
ing that vessels sailing in the vicinity of these countries should
voluntarily submit to an examination of their cargo by proceed-
ing on their own initiative to the contraband control stations
maintained by these Governments. Part of the Finnish merchant
fleets has, indeed, followed this advice. Those vessels, which have
tried to pass the contraband control stations, but have then been
stopped, have mostly been conveyed to one of these irrespective
of distance, in which case also the examination, to which they
have been subjected in port, has been more thorough than usual,
so that in such cases the vessel is delayed for a longer period than
those which proceeded voluntarily to a control station.
According to the principles of international law previously
in force, the visitation of neutral and even of enemy merchant
ships was to be effected, at least as a general rule, on stoppage of
the vessel. True enough, different methods were put into practice
in the Great War, but at certain post-war international naval
conferences (e. g., Washington 1922, London 1930 and 1936) the
discussions which took place and the ensuing decisions show that
the new practices were not approved, at least not generally. The
legality of the British and French methods referred to above is
therefore debatable.
The purpose of the examination to which Finnish merchant
vessels have been subjected has been to ensure that they carried
no cargo bound either direct or by roundabout routes for Ger-
many. Cases have occurred in which part of the cargo has been
confiscated on the above mentioned grounds, but the ships af-
fected were permitted thereafter to continue their voyage. Some-
times, to settle the ultimate destination of the cargo, it has been
necessary to procure various evidence from Finland, and bel-
ligerents may also have demanded and obtained from those con-
cerned, guarantees that no articles of a contraband character in-
cluded in the cargo would later be reshipped from a neutral
destination to an enemy State. In a couple of cases British au-
thorities have removed from ships bound for Finland cargo ad-
dressed to a Finnish consignee and confiscated it on the grounds