The International Court of Justice: Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v. Colombia)

Abstract

In 2012, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered its fourth judgment in Nicaragua v. Colombia. The case was first initiated by Nicaragua under the Bogotá Pact in 2001. The fourth judgment affirmed Colombia’s territorial sovereignty over a group of islands in the western Caribbean Sea and delimited a boundary between the two states’ zones of maritime jurisdiction. Even after eleven years of complicated proceedings, however, the parties’ conflicting claims are not yet completely resolved. The ICJ explicitly declined to address Nicaragua’s potential entitlement to the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its coastal baselines, including the portion of Nicaragua’s ‘‘outer’’ continental shelf that allegedly overlaps with Colombia’s maritime entitlements. For the foreseeable future, this aspect of the controversy will likely remain unresolved. One week after the ICJ rendered its fourth judgment, Colombia withdrew from the Bogotá Pact and thereby terminated its consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction.