The Law of the Sea
A little research goes a long way.
I read some misinformation recently that bothered me. It was in a Facebook post (shocker!). What they said, basically, was that the current administration was renaming the Gulf of Mexico in order to protect our borders, due to a recent change made to laws governing the seas.
I don’t want to contribute to the nasty back and forth that happens when someone has an online argument. So I thought I’d put a different viewpoint out there for the people who are concerned about such things. One of my professors many moons ago was an expert in what is called The Law of the Sea (economist Richard James Sweeney). He piqued my interest in the topic, and I’ve followed it from a distance for many years.
This is a complicated topic, so I’m going to boil it down to just the main points. The whole issue started a long time ago, when countries began to argue about who controlled the waters along their coasts. Think about the area between England and France — the Strait of Dover. At its closest point, there is only 33km between the two countries. Who controls the water? Or what about an island nation like Japan, which is so close to North and South Korea and Russia? How far does national territory extend?
The big disagreement started in the 17th century when Spain and Portugal were the major shipping and trading powers, and they wanted the seas to themselves. At one point, Spain claimed the entire Pacific Ocean for itself. A Dutchman named Hugo Grotius wrote Mare Librium (The Freedom of the Seas), which put forward the idea that the sea should be international territory.
For hundreds of years, the argument continued, which led to not a few battles. Beginning in the 20th century, the generally accepted international law was that national rights were limited to a narrow band of water from the coastline, usually three nautical miles (nm) wide, based on the distance that a cannon could be fired. This became known as the “cannon shot” rule. Everything beyond the cannon shot distance was considered international waters, available to everyone.
As technology improved, countries could find natural resources further and further beyond their territorial waters. This led US President Harry S. Truman to extend American jurisdiction to all of America’s continental shelf in 1945. Partly due to this change, the United Nations held its first Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1956. This conference and its successors led to several international treaties which covered various specific aspects of territorial rights, and finally led to UNCLOS III in 1973, which continued to be negotiated for 9 years until 1982, when a significant agreement was reached.
Some yoyo on Facebook can say whatever they want to try to justify the administration’s actions, but when you actually do some research, their assertions fall flat.
The 1982 agreement is still called UNCLOS, but this time it stands for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is widely considered the defining international legal document related to the seas. Under UNCLOS, there were several key changes: countries are allowed to extract resources within 200 nm from their shores in areas called Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs); depending on geology, countries can go beyond 200 nm to follow their continental shelves; countries like Indonesia that are composed of several islands can control all the waters within their outermost islands; and some national boundaries have been “frozen” to avoid problems from rising sea levels which might otherwise reduce their territory.
UNCLOS has been ratified by 168 countries. Unsurprisingly, the US has not ratified UNCLOS, although it follows the Convention under international customary law.
Given all that background, we can see that changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico by fiat does absolutely nothing to our land/sea boundaries. Some yoyo on Facebook can say whatever they want to try to justify the administration’s actions, but when you actually do some research, their assertions fall flat.
It would be helpful if more factual information was available on all kinds of topics. We might start with tariffs.
If you want to get into more detail about this topic, the entire document is available online at: https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf
I liked this article, and I learned from it. Nice to see more than just research, but facts. Now on to tariffs . . .