Commissions of the Danube River

See Internationalization of the Danube River for events before 1856.

The Commissions of the Danube River were authorized by the Treaty of Paris (1856) after the close of the Crimean War. One of these international commissions, the most successful, was the European Commission of the Danube, or, in French, Commission Européenne du Danube, the CED, which had authority over the three mouths of the river — the Chilia in the north, the Sulina in the middle, and the St. George in the south and which was originally designed to last for only two years. Instead, it lasted eighty-two years. A separate commission, the International Danube Commission, or IDC, was authorized to control commerce and improvements upriver beyond the Danube Delta and was supposed to be permanent, but it was not formally organized until after 1918.

The European Commission of the Danube was the first — and for a long time the only — international body to have serious police and juridical powers over private vessels and individual people, and it was seen in 1930, for example, by history professor Glen A. Blackburn of the United States as a "unique" organization.

Without territorial possessions, it is nevertheless a distinct international entity, possessing sovereignty over the broad waters of the Danube. . . . These entirely discretionary functions need the sanction of no group of nations, and there is no appeal from the edicts of the Commission.

The lower section of the Danube, he continued, was "more than an internationalized river" because the CED wielded independent administrative powers. He concluded that the commission:

falls short of being a bona fide member of the family of nations because its existence is largely de facto and not de jure. . . . It is safe to predict that the need for protecting the integrity of the commission will some day lift it out of the twilight of statehood and accord it full membership in the League of Nations.

To the contrary, Joseph L. Kunz, a professor of international law at the University of Toledo in Ohio, wrote in 1945 that international river commissions were organized on the collegiate principle, composed of "persons appointed by the contracting states, representing them and having to act in conformity with the instructions of their states." They were, he concluded, objects, not subjects, of international law.

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