activities and forfeit U.S. sovereignty. They assert that
accession is unnecessary for the United States to enjoy the
benefits of the convention because of its provisions as customary international law based on binding agreements of
the 1958 Geneva Conventions on the Law of the Sea.
A Jan. 28 blog posting by the John Birch Society
warned that the convention authorizes “U.N. control
over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. … [Joining the
convention] would constitute a major step toward a
United Nations world government and would give the
U.N. control over everything happening over, on and
under the world’s oceans and seas.”
In spite of these criticisms, John Oliver, senior ocean
policy adviser in the Office of Policy Integration at the U.S.
Coast Guard, said there is a sense of urgency to join the
convention on the part of the Pentagon, the State Department and the environmental groups that have lined up to
support the Law of the Sea. The most pressing concerns,
he said, involve high seas freedom, or “the principle of
freedom of navigation, which is so critical to our national
security and our ability to engage in international trade,
and being able to go through international waters.
Adm. Thad Allen, commandant of the Coast Guard,
has repeatedly emphasized the need for the United
States to join the convention.
“Becoming a party to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea would greatly enhance
our global position in maritime affairs,” he said in a
statement May 17, 2007.
In the course of efforts to engage other nations on multilateral maritime domain and security initiatives, “We’ve
often met with the response, ‘Why should we engage with
the United States [if] the United States is unwilling to
engage with the rest of the world community in the Law
of the Sea Convention?’” Oliver said. “If we were one of
the key players, we would be very influential.”
While innocent passage and navigational freedoms
are critically important to U.S. security and international
trade, so too are the prospects of harvesting the rich
resources on the extended continental shelf of the United
States, which has the largest Exclusive Economic Zone in
the world. Its various extended continental shelf areas in
the Gulf of Mexico, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean
hold vast oil and gas reserves. And in Alaska, the prolongation of the continental shelf is believed to extend 600
miles north into the Arctic Ocean and the Chukchi Sea.
However, because it is not a party of the Law of the Sea
Treaty, Oliver said, “The United States is not able to make
an extended continental shelf claim in the Arctic to the
trillion-plus dollars in oil and gas that would be on the
extended continental shelf beyond 200 miles. We don’t
have guaranteed international rights to those resources.”
In a November speech at the University of California
Berkeley School of Law’s Law of the Sea Institute, John
U.S. NAVY
Small craft suspected to be from the Islamic Republic of
Iran Revolutionary Guard Navy maneuver near U.S. Navy
ships in the Strait of Hormuz in January 2008. Critics of
the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea maintain participation in the treaty is unnecessary to guarantee passage through critical sea lanes like the Strait of Hormuz
because those rights are not currently threatened by law
or by any military capable of opposing the United States.
Bellinger III, a former State Department legal adviser,
noted, “The Law of the Sea Convention codifies the sovereignty and sovereign rights of the United States over
extensive maritime territory and natural resources off its
coasts. [It] establishes an institution — the Commission
on the Limits of the Continental Shelf — that offers a
coastal state the opportunity to maximize international
recognition and legal certainty with respect to the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles offshore.”
The need for a legitimate legal framework also has
figured largely in the Arctic Ocean, where a great deal of
attention has been directed in the past few years because
of easier transit potential. The public has perceived the
Arctic as a new frontier, when in fact the Law of the Sea
Treaty, as stated by Bellinger, “provides an extensive
legal framework for a host of issues relevant to the
Arctic. It sets forth navigational rights and freedoms for
commercial and military vessels and aircraft in various
maritime areas; it sets forth rules for resolving cases
where the maritime claims of coastal nations overlap. ...
And, finally, the Law of the Sea provides rules regarding
marine scientific research in the Arctic.”
Furthermore, the convention addresses the sovereignty of the five Arctic Coastal States — the United States,
Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway. In May 2008, in
Ilulissat, Greenland, these nations held an Arctic Ocean
Conference in which they reaffirmed in The Ilulissat
Declaration that a governing treaty was not necessary
because of the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Experts are optimistic that U.S. approval of the treaty
will happen within the current presidential term.
“It’s a low-hanging fruit for international engagement,”
Oliver said. “The administration would be able to demonstrate to the world that we are going to be more engaged
than the previous administrations, so I am positive.” ■
