Abstract
Despite the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) being generally viewed as one of the major successes of United Nations treaty-making, unresolved issues remain. These range from maritime boundary disputes to straight baselines to artificial islands to military activities in the exclusive economic zone to environmental issues. Four decades have altered the fundamental nature of the regime relating to the law of the sea and have created major implementational challenges. The oceans are becoming more crowded by competitive human activities and, as technology progresses and geopolitical shifts occur, it has become imperative that the unresolved issues be resolved. In so doing UNCLOS’s initial vision can be augmented. This article focuses on five of the more problematic unresolved issues.
Highlights
The 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS)[1] is generally accepted as a success story in the history of United Nations (UN) treaty-making, with some 160 states as parties, there are in practice still many unresolved issues
Brazil,[26] in its ratification of UNCLOS, asserted that article 301’s reference to “peaceful uses of the oceans” applied in particular to maritime areas under the sovereignty or jurisdiction of the coastal state and that states were not to conduct military exercises or manoeuvres in such areas. This interpretation has been contested by states such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy and the Netherlands; they maintain that article 58(1) of UNCLOS states that the rights enjoyed by coastal states in their exclusive economic zone (EEZ) are subject to the freedoms referred to in article 87, which relate to navigation, overflight, laying of submarine cables, pipelines and other lawful international uses of the sea
The discussion above has only touched briefly on five conspicuous unresolved issues relating to UNCLOS
Summary
Despite the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) being generally viewed as one of the major successes of United Nations treaty-making, unresolved issues remain. These range from maritime boundary disputes to straight baselines to artificial islands to military activities in the exclusive economic zone to environmental issues. Four decades have altered the fundamental nature of the regime relating to the law of the sea and have created major implementational challenges. The oceans are becoming more crowded by competitive human activities and, as technology progresses and geopolitical shifts occur, it has become imperative that the unresolved issues be resolved. This article focuses on five of the more problematic unresolved issues
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