The Third United Nation’s Conference on the Law of the Sea: The 1977 New York Session

Abstract

The sixth session of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea was held in New York from May 23 to July 15, 1977.The Conference confirmed two procedural decisions taken at the close of the fifth sesison—to devote the first two or three weeks of the sixth session to Committee I (deep seabed) problems and to entrust the President and Committee Chairmen with the preparation of an informal composite text of the treaty as a whole later in the session. In the interim between the fifth and sixth sessions, Minister Jens Evensen of Norway, Vice-President of the Conference, who at an earlier stage of the Conference had held lengthy informal meetings on economic zone matters with marked success, arranged for an intersessional meeting in Geneva early in 1977 on the deep seabeds sytem of exploitation, to which all conference participants were invited. Minister Evensen continued these efforts at the Conference itself, reporting to the Chairman of the First Committee.