Hope Springs Eternal For The U.S. To Finally Ratify The Law Of The Sea Convention

It has been widely reported that Senator John Kerry (D-MA), Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is considering bringing up the long dormant Law of the Sea Convention ("Convention") for a vote in this Congress. Of course, the Senator has tried this before and was not able to muster the 2/3 vote required for ratification. Will this year be any different? As a reminder, the Convention was negotiated in 1982, and after its ratification by the requisite number of countries, went into effect in 1994. The U.S. signed the Convention but never ratified it, an action that requires a 2/3 vote of the U.S. Senate. President Reagan declined to support ratification in 1982 because of the seabed mining provisions in Part XI of the treaty, but instructed his agencies to comply with the rest of the treaty as a matter of customary international law—and that has been the position of the U.S. ever since. Subsequently, Part XI was renegotiated by the parties, and changes were made to satisfy U.S. concerns. Despite these modifications, the U.S. is still not a party to this major international treaty delineating rights and responsibilities to the oceans of the world and the resources that lie within.

Some things are different this year. For one, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Ranking Member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is actively supporting the treaty. This is no doubt due to the fact that Alaska and oil and gas interests may well stand to benefit from ratification and being able to claim larger portions of the outer continental shelf under the Arctic Ocean and adjacent to Alaska. As most readers know, the Arctic ice is melting and several nations, including Russia, are staking sovereignty claims to portions of the Arctic. But, the U.S. does not have a formal seat at the table of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a body established under the Law of the Sea Convention to review and certify claims. (See "Who Owns the Arctic?" N. Gronewold, New York Times, May 14, 2009.) The Commission is currently reviewing national claims to areas of the Arctic based on surveys conducted in the region. Interest in the resources under the Arctic Circle was greatly expanded when the U.S. Geological Survey, in 2008, released a study of undeveloped Arctic oil and gas resources. The study concluded that approximately 90 billion barrels of oil, 1669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 44 billion barrels of natural gas...

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