A ‘Constitution for the Oceans'
The Long Hard Road to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

This analysis of the making of the UN law of the sea treaties traces the transformation of policy into law.

Kirsten Sellars (Author)

9781108840149, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 February 2025

372 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

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.

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 1973–82 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.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB]