ASSEMBLY TAKES UP PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF SEABED AUTHORITY

Press Release
SEA/1539

ASSEMBLY TAKES UP PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF SEABED AUTHORITY

KINGSTON, 18 March -- The Assembly of the International Seabed Authority, meeting at Kingston this morning, began consideration of a draft protocol on the legal privileges and immunities of the Authority.

The Authority's Secretary-General, Satya N. Nandan, made a brief presentation based on the work of a working group established in August 1996 to review a draft document submitted by the Preparatory Commission for the Authority and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea. Following a brief discussion, it was decided that further consultations be held between the President and the working group, the results of which will be presented on Friday morning, 21 March, when the Assembly next meets.

Some members of the working group, the Secretary-General noted, had questioned whether a protocol was necessary since many of the provisions contained in the draft were already addressed in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established the Authority.

The Secretary-General said that the document to be presented would be annotated to differentiate those provisions already in the Convention from those taken from other sources. That annotation would show that a considerable portion of the Convention was repeated. He noted, however, that the provisions of the Convention did not fully address certain matters, such as the use of laissez passer by staff of the Authority. That omission would seem to justify the need for a protocol for dealing with privileges and immunities.

Mr. Nandan noted the concern of some delegations that certain provisions in the protocol, when isolated from the Convention, would grant a unique advantage to the Enterprise, the mining arm of the Authority, over similar commercial entities. He stressed that the essential purpose of the protocol was to enable the Authority to function efficiently and asked that the text be carefully examined to determine whether certain provisions already contained in the Convention could be safely omitted.

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In the brief discussion that followed, the representative of Austria asked whether the working group had examined the idea of applying to the Authority the provisions of similar international conventions on privileges and immunities.

The representative of Germany observed that the Authority would become a specialized agency upon concluding its relationship agreement with the United Nations. The Secretary-General confirmed that the possibility of applying the international convention on privileges and immunities of the specialized agencies had been considered, but that the Authority was not eligible because it did not have a reporting relationship with the Economic and Social Council.

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