Oceans and Law of the Sea

Sri Asih Roza Nova of Indonesia has started the second phase of the Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe Memorial Fellowship on the Law of the Sea, at the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea, Office of Legal Affairs. She started the second, practical phase of the Fellowship programme and her research paper on 13 January and will complete it on 9 March.

Pursuant to General Assembly resolution 65/37 A, of 7 December 2010, and the decision of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf at its twenty-seventh session, the twenty-eighth session of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf will be held in New York from 1 August to 9 September. The plenary part of the twenty-eighth session will be held from 15 to 26 August.

The States parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea today opened its doors to fill a vacancy in the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, in the midst of that body’s annual session at Headquarters.

Sri Asih Roza Nova of Indonesia has been awarded the twenty-fourth Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe Fellowship on the Law of the Sea. In case Ms. Rosa Nova is unable to accept the Fellowship, Thang Nguyen Dang of Viet Nam will be awarded the twenty-fourth award.

The twelfth United Nations Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea will meet at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 20 to 24 June. This meeting will serve to provide an important input to the discussions leading up to Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development that will be held in Rio de Janeiro next 4-6 June 2012.

Concluding its annual session today, the twenty-first Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea decided to link future adjustments to the annual base salary for members of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to those of the judges of the International Court of Justice.

The twenty-first Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea today asked the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to consider meeting in New York, simultaneously with its subcommissions, for up to six months annually over the next five years, and recommended that any request for Secretariat resources to facilitate more working weeks be presented to the General Assembly during its sixty-sixth session.

At the midpoint of its annual session, the States parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea today elected six members to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, but failed to fill one additional seat, forcing a second day of voting tomorrow.

As the States parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea continued their annual session today, delegates expressed diverging views on the workload of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, hearing a presentation by the Coordinator of the Working Group established in 2009 to address that body’s burgeoning responsibilities.

With the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea steadily approaching universal participation, the twenty-first Meeting of States Parties to that treaty opened today with the election of several Bureau members and the adoption of the provisional agenda for its week-long session.