International Law and the Sabah Dispute: A Postscript
![handle is hein.journals/ayil1968 and id is 144 raw text is: International Law and the Sabah Dispute:
A Postcriptt'1
By GEOFFREY MAMSTON*
In the recently released British Government archives appears a
letter of March 1917 from the Governor of British North Borneo to
the British North Borneo Company about the so-called Carpenter
Agreement of 22 March 1915 whereby the Sultan of Sulu lost any
temporal sovereignty he might have retained over American Territory.
The Governor wrote:
It is not clear what effect this agreement has on the position of the
Sultan as the lessor sof parts of British North Borneo to this Govern-
ment, but it seems -that in the unlikely event of our failure to pay
the cession agreement, the sovereign rights over this territory would
become the property of the United States Government.
The Company replied, however, that it thought that the Carpenter
Agreement referred specifically to American territory.2]
In November 1922, after the proposal of a resolution in the Philip-
pine House of Representatives for the return of British North Borneo
to the Philippines, the Librarian of the Foreign Office prepared a
memorandum which set out the history of British rule in North
Borneo and reached the conclusion that no right of reversion to the
United States could exist[331 This memorandum was referred to with
approval by the Foreign Office nearly ten years later when, in July
1931, the British Consul-General in Manila reported that the Sultan
of Sulu had lost his version of the concession of 1878 and was com-
plaining that the British North Borneo Company had refused to supply
him with a copy of their version. The Foreign Office referred the
Manila dispatch to the Colonial Office which, in turn, transmitted it
to the British North Borneo Company. The latter, in a letter to the
Colonial Office of 17 November 1931, denied that the 1878 transaction
was a lease as allegedly claimed by the Sultan, but stated that it was
a grant expressed to be for ever and in perpetuity. The Company
stated further that the Governor of North Borneo was being authorized,
if he saw no objection, to furnish the Sultan with photographic repro-
o Lecturer, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. Fonerly Senior
Lecturer in Law, A.N.U.
1 See the present writer's article in 1967 Australian Yearbook of International
Law.
2 This correspondence is Sled in the Public Record Oce, London, as C.O.
874/1029.
3 F.O. 371/8512.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ayil1968&div=11&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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International Law and the Sabah Dispute: A Postscript
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