MEDVEDYEV AND OTHERS v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 19 Convention, they submitted that the Government were proposing an interpretation which distorted its meaning, as the Winner had not been without nationality and had not had the same nationality as the French warship. 45. The applicants also considered that Law no. 94-589 of 15 July 1994 was not applicable, particularly because it referred to international conventions to which Cambodia was not a party. 46. They considered it established that domestic and international law failed to afford effective protection against arbitrary interference when it did not provide for the possibility of contacting a lawyer or family member but did, according to the Government, authorise thirteen days’ detention. 47. Concerning the diplomatic note of 7 June 2002, the applicants also challenged the Government’s legal interpretation. They maintained that it could not be considered as a delegation of jurisdiction to France. Even assuming, for argument’s sake, that such an ad hoc agreement did justify French intervention in keeping with the principle of public international law that a State could relinquish part of its sovereignty other than by a convention, they alleged that the limits of such an exceptional transfer of power had been considerably exceeded in the present case. According to the Government’s own submissions, the agreement had merely concerned a “request to intercept”, while the Cambodian government had only authorised the “stopping” of the ship (“arraisonnement” in French). Strictly speaking, this consisted solely in stopping the ship at sea or on arrival in port to make certain verifications (concerning its identity and its nationality, for example): it did not extend to searches or arrests on board the ship. Yet that was what had happened in this case: the applicants had been arrested and confined to their cabins for thirteen days. Their detention on board the Winner and their judgment in another country had not been authorised by Cambodia. The applicants thus challenged the existence of any ad hoc agreement justifying the stopping of the Winner and considered that even if there had been such an agreement, it did not justify the detention of the crew following the French military operation. 48. The applicants further submitted that the production before the Grand Chamber of a diplomatic note dated 9 September 2008, sent by the Cambodian authorities at the request of the French Government seven years after the events and two months after the Fifth Section of the Court had pronounced judgment in their favour, was “very late and quite astounding”. They requested that the note, which had never been produced in the proceedings before the domestic courts and the Fifth Section of the Court, as it had not existed at the time and amounted to a reinterpretation of the facts after the event, be disallowed as evidence.