UN General Assembly
1959

83. As the Government of a law-abiding country that upholds compliance with international rules and obligations in accordance with the classical tradition of international law, the Government of Peru, which is linked to the Egyptian Government and people by longstanding ties of admiration and even of historical parallel between their ancient cultures, would like to echo the hope already expressed by the representatives of the Great Powers that the age-old freedom of the seas — one of the first and great achievements of law among nations — will be restored, in that part of the world. As heirs to the Spanish legal tradition which proclaimed the inalienable sovereignty of the peoples of America, we cannot but recall that -the Spaniard Francisco de Vitoria, regarded by the American, Brown Scott, as the father of international law, upon first establishing jus inter omnes gentes, i.e. the first principles of the law of nations, declared that all people had the right to travel to another country and to trade with it without restriction of any kind and that preventing them from so doing was one of the few possible grounds for a "just war" between peoples. Thus freedom of trade and friendship between nations, re-stated by the Dutchman Grotius in his book De jure belli ac pacts in 1625, is one of the essential prerequisites of peace and law among nations.