UNCLOS: Law of the Sea
The
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was signed in
1982 in Montego Bay, Jamaica and brought under its umbrella the maritime
laws enshrined in four maritime treaties which were signed in 1958.
Although it was signed in 1982, it didn’t actually come into force until
twelve years later when, after seemingly endless discussions on policy
that had kept the USA from signing up, modifications were made that
allowed the US to give its conditional backing to the Agreement on
Implementation, though to this day the US has not ratified the
agreement. Up to this date it has 157 signatories and has come to be
accepted as a rubber-stamping of the principles of the Customary International Law regarding maritime law.
The United Nations Connection!
Despite
the name, UNCLOS is not operated by the United Nations, although the
organisation does give its support to the Convention, providing premises
for meetings of its representatives, and also administers the
ratification of UNCLOS’s conclusions and the accession of new member
states. The abbreviation by which the Convention is known was actually
originally used in 1958 when it referred to the first-ever United
Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea which, though it reached many helpful conclusions, left open the issue of breadth of territorial waters.
Current Scenario
UNCLOS
sat again in 1960 for six weeks, reaching no conclusions and basically
taking the role as a
stand-off between the respective allies of the USA
and the then USSR. Seven years later the Maltese diplomat Arvid Pardo
raised the issue of varying territorial claims over bodies of water, but
it still took another six years to convene the third and final
conference.
It was at this
conference that the decision was taken to ditch the idea of a majority
vote thus avoiding the danger that large cabals of pressure groups would
dominate proceedings, and replacing the system with a consensus
process. This time around the conference sat for a total of nine years,
due to the combination of the aforementioned consensus process and the
vast number of nations attending. At this sitting of the Conference, it
was decided that a coastal state had dominion over the waters up to
twelve miles off its own coast.
Created
at the same time as the UNCLOS was the ITLOS – International Tribunal
for the Law of the Sea, which is the overall court of law for disputes
concerning maritime matters, and has 155 members at the last count.
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