United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was adopted on 10 December 1982 and entered into force on 16 November 1994. It replaced a patchwork of customary claims and unilateral assertions with one comprehensive legal framework, often called a constitution for the oceans, binding all parties equally. It is by a wide margin the longest instrument in this bank: 320 articles across 17 parts, plus nine technical annexes.

Its treatment of sovereignty is graduated rather than absolute. A coastal State holds full sovereignty over its territorial sea out to 12 nautical miles, sovereign rights rather than full sovereignty over its Exclusive Economic Zone for resource exploration and management out to 200 nautical miles, and more limited rights again over its continental shelf beyond that. Beyond national jurisdiction, freedom of the high seas is the default: all States, coastal or landlocked, have equal rights to navigate, overfly, lay submarine cables and pipelines and conduct scientific research there. Landlocked States keep a treaty right of transit through neighbouring States to reach the ocean at all.

Article 136 makes the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction, called the Area, and its resources the common heritage of mankind. They belong to humanity as a whole rather than to whoever reaches them first, activities there must be carried out for the benefit of all with particular consideration for the needs of developing States, and they are administered through the International Seabed Authority.

Part XII turns environmental protection into an affirmative duty rather than a permission. States commit to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from any source, whether land-based, from vessels, from seabed activities or atmospheric, and to cooperate globally and regionally in doing so. Conservation of living marine resources is likewise a shared duty and not merely a national right: coastal States must ensure that living resources in their Exclusive Economic Zone are not endangered by over-exploitation, and neighbouring and distant-water States carry rights and duties over shared, straddling and highly migratory fish stocks.

Two further balances run through the treaty. Innocent passage through territorial seas and transit passage through straits used for international navigation exist precisely so that sovereignty over a strip of sea does not become a power to close the world's shipping lanes. And Part XV establishes compulsory dispute-settlement machinery, including the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, so that disagreements over interpretation or application have a legal path rather than only a political or military one.

This record is deliberately a summary and says so. The overwhelming majority of the Convention's articles set technical rules, how to draw a baseline, how to measure a continental shelf, tribunal procedure, that carry no independent ethical content. The survey and boundary-delimitation mechanics, the continental-shelf submission procedures to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf and the detailed institutional architecture of the Seabed Authority and the Tribunal are all real and legally binding, and are omitted here as procedural rather than as statements of what the Convention holds to be right or wrong. The complete treaty is published by the United Nations.