A ‘Constitution for the Oceans': The Long Hard Road to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

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A ‘Constitution for the Oceans': The Long Hard Road to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

By Kirsten Sellars
Cambridge University Press February 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781108840149
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
February 2025
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in 1982, was the culmination of half a century of legal endeavour. Earlier attempts to create a treaty regime governing the ocean — at League of Nations and United Nations conferences in 1930, 1958 and 1960 — had all failed to settle the breadth of the territorial sea, and in two cases failed to settle anything at all.

During the negotiations, legal concepts were formulated and reformulated: straight baselines inspired archipelagic baselines; fishing conservation zones became exclusive economic zones; innocent passage through straits metamorphosed into transit passage through straits; and the seabed common heritage was replaced by the parallel system of seabed exploitation. Many of the issues that animated the delegates during the negotiations — ocean pollution, over-fishing, naval mobility, continental shelf claims and the impact of seabed mining — continue to exercise policymakers and lawyers to this day.

Table of Contents

1. End of the old order: the attempt to create a convention on territorial waters
2. Old freedoms, new rights: the Corfu Channel and Fisheries cases
3. North, South, East and West: new ideas and new actors at the 1958 conference
4. A conference collapses: no settlement on the territorial sea or fishing limits in 1960
5. Internationalising the seabed: common heritage and the UN seabed committee
6. Passage through straits: from innocent passage to transit passage at the 1973–82 conference
7. The archipelagic concept: division, unity and archipelagic statehood
8. New international orders: the exclusive economic zone, the continental margin, and marine scientific research
9. The bitter end: the seabed mining controversy and the signing of the convention
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
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