US moving to UNCLOS ratification?
Following on from my post about marine genetic resources from a couple of months ago and the subsequent discussions in the comments about countries that are and are not Party to UNCLOS (the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), I see that the August 9th edition of Nature has a piece entitled “Strife on the Seven Seas” (unfortunately, behind a pay wall.)
The sub-title of the article is “The sight of nations jockeying for position on the high seas is becoming more common. An international treaty exists to deal with such disputes and it is time for the US Senate to ratify it.” So Nature is urging the US to ratify UNCLOS.
The article seems to be largely prompted by Russia’s recent planting of its flag on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Nature discusses how there is increasing competition for the ocean’s resources and the need for law to govern how these resources are divided up and the environment protected:
When humans were less able to harm the sea — skating on its surface in wooden boats and taking resources in relatively small quantities — it could be a lawless common. But now our society must manage the sea very carefully, lest the waters become a lifeless waste.
The article also mentions the discussion on marine genetic resources at UNICPOLOS: “The treaty’s scope can expand as fresh issues arise: at the convention’s most recent meeting, in May in New York, a framework for dealing with marine genetic resources was discussed.”
The article also supports the point I made in the comments following the June 20th post that, while the US isn’t formally a party to the treaty, it does abide by many of its rules and obligations:
In practice, the United States already abides by nearly all of these provisions. So why has the treaty languished there since 1994 without its ratification even being considered on the Senate floor? At one point, opposition focused on a section on seabed mining that representatives of some nations considered too
restrictive. But since that was rewritten, also in 1994, opposition has been confined primarily to a dozen or so conservative senators who are philosophically opposed to the encroachment of UN rules on what they regard as the United States’ rights as a sovereign nation.
Perhaps most important, though, are the repeated urgings for US ratification of UNCLOS.
the US Senate has yet to ratify the country’s membership of the convention. It should do so immediately, so that the United States can play a grown-up role in the development of the framework established by the treaty.
The piece ends with a listing of the different factions in the US that now support ratification including the environmental lobby, the oil industry, the US State Department and even the Bush administration. It is hard to imagine this administration supporting the US joining any United Nations-based multilateral initiative but I’ve heard similar rumblings about the US possibly ratifying the FAO IT because they can’t afford to be left out. We’ll see.
Anyway, US ratification of UNCLOS isn’t entirely in the administration’s hands, requiring instead Senator Joseph Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to bring a resolution of ratification through the Committee to the Senate floor. According to Buxbaum, the administration is campaigning for ratification and Senator Biden is considering a hearing of the matter by the Committee in September. But ratification requires a majority two-thirds vote in favour in the Senate, definitely not a given.
For lots of links and discussion of US ratification of UNCLOS, see Anthony Clark Arend’s Exploring International Law blog at Georgetown University.
Posted on August 24th, 2007 under ABS • 
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