Oceans and Law of the Sea

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.

The twenty-first Meeting of States Parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea will be held at Headquarters from 13 to 17 June. Often referred to as “the constitution of the oceans”, the landmark Convention was adopted on 10 December 1982 and entered into force on 16 November 1994. Its 320 articles and nine annexes govern all aspects of ocean space and maritime issues.

The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (the “Commission”) held its twenty-seventh session at United Nations Headquarters from 7 March to 21 April 2011, pursuant to the decisions taken at its twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth sessions as well as pursuant to General Assembly resolution 65/37 A. The plenary part of the session was held from 28 March to 5 April.