A ‘Constitution for the Oceans'

The Long Hard Road to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

Kirsten Sellars

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108881746
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in 1982, was the culmination of half a century of legal endeavour. Earlier attempts to create a treaty regime governing the ocean — at League of Nations and United Nations conferences in 1930, 1958 and 1960 — had all failed to settle the breadth of the territorial sea, and in two cases failed to settle anything at all. During the negotiations, legal concepts were formulated and reformulated: straight baselines inspired archipelagic baselines; fishing conservation zones became exclusive economic zones; innocent passage through straits metamorphosed into transit passage through straits; and the seabed common heritage was replaced by the parallel system of seabed exploitation. Many of the issues that animated the delegates during the negotiations — ocean pollution, over-fishing, naval mobility, continental shelf claims and the impact of seabed mining — continue to exercise policymakers and lawyers to this day.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 End of the Old Order: The Attempt to Create a Convention on Territorial Waters
• 2 Old Freedoms, New Rights: The Corfu Channel and Fisheries Cases
• 3 North, South, East and West: New Ideas and New Actors at the 1958 Conference
• 4 A Conference Collapses: No Settlement on the Territorial Sea or Fishing Limits in 1960
• 5 Internationalising the Seabed: Common Heritage and the UN Seabed Committee
• 6 Passage through Straits: From Innocent Passage to Transit Passage at the 1973–1982 Conference
• 7 The Archipelagic Concept: Division, Unity and Archipelagic Statehood
• 8 New International Orders: The Exclusive Economic Zone, the Continental Margin and Marine Scientific Research
• 9 The Bitter End: The Seabed Mining Controversy and the Signing of the Convention
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index