A Review of the Historical and Traditional Approaches to the Application of the Law of Territorial Waters of Mid-Ocean Archipelagos and Archipelagic States

Abstract

The traditional legal terms and governing concepts have been set forth as well as an introduction to the special problems regarding component parts of an archipelago. It is now necessary to present a complete review of the historical and traditional approaches to the application of the law of territorial waters to mid-ocean archipelagos and archipelagic States. The influence of the legal terms and governing concepts on the international community will become apparent as this Chapter develops from a discussion commencing with the contributions, if any, of the various private scientific and scholarly organizations and terminating with a review of the viewpoints of publicists and legal writers. Every effort has been made to present all of the materials regarding archipelagos in this Chapter. The review of all of the materials and contributions will make it apparent that (a) in most instances, the sources have not and do not distinguish between coastal and mid-ocean archipelagos and (b), there is a degree of rigidity (or adherence to the traditional terms but not necessarily to the governing concepts) that prevents any practical and workable solution to the problem being presented at this time. Nevertheless, each of the discussions in the private scholarly and scientific organizations, and, in particular, the draft articles produced at each of the conferences, is important and relevant to the proposal being made in this study because each article demonstrates a problem that was raised at a particular international conference or at committee level. As will be seen, some of the problems are repetitious, having lingered at international conferences without being resolved, and none of these problems was resolved in a satisfactory manner to either the special interest (i. e. archipelagic States) or general interest groups (i. e. maritime nations).