The question of the exercise of rights of navigation in the post-UNCLOS III environment subsumes one of the most complex sets of issues relating to the law of the sea that could be addressed today under existing circumstances. As is well known, the United States and three other countries voted against the adoption of the Law of the Sea Treaty on April 30, 1982.' Since that time, Argentina has announced that it will not sign the Treaty,2 and other countries are in the process of evaluating the Treaty in the light of their own national interests. Such circumstances complicate any analysis of navigation rights and call for an examination of two interrelated questions. First, one must examine the Treaty provisions themselves to ascertain what the Treaty drafters intended with respect to the relative rights of coastal states and other states with respect to navigation-related issues. Before one can seek to understand the state of the law in this confused situation, that is, whether the Treaty provisions have any independent life of their own, it is critical to undertake a proper reading of them. The second question, when the analysis is complete, is one of the relationship of those texts to the rights and duties of those states which may not become parties to the Convention. Some observers are already attaching considerable significance to the provisions of the Treaty, whether the Convention enters into force or not. Some are even of the view that the nonseabeds provisions of the texts already reflect norms of customary international law. For example, the introductory note to the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, tentative draft 3, states: Except with respect to Part XI of the Draft Convention, this Restatement, in general, accepts the Draft Convention as codifying the customary