Law of the Sea treaty covers mineral rights

The Law of the Sea, a complex and controversial international treaty that sets down rules on how the seas’ bounty will be used, came into effect in mid-November.

The United Nations treaty also tackles issues of sovereignty, a perpetually prickly issue in cases in which states have yet to iron out age-old disputes over who has the right to the seas’ valuable resources, Agence France Presse reports.

Signed by 150 countries and ratified by 67 of them, the treaty, which was first approved by the UN General Assembly in 1982, contains 320 articles and nine annexes. It was adopted after 60 UN member states ratified the accord. At stake are billions of dollars in jurisdiction rights to tap rich deposits of seabed minerals and to harvest fish. If all nations were to abide by the treaty, it could also settle differences over territorial sea boundaries. For years, the question over mineral rights blocked passage of the treaty. Some Western countries, including the U.S., opposed a multinational organization that would control rights to exploration and extraction of seabed minerals, possibly limiting their rights to a new source of wealth. But in July, the treaty was more liberally interpreted to indicate that in the future, companies exploring and extracting deep seabed minerals may continue to do so themselves.

This should entice Western countries, which would be the backbone of the treaty, to sign on. France is expected to do so next year, and the U.S. already has begun the ratification process.

The treaty may help settle some sovereignty questions by giving signatories a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone with sovereign rights over natural resources and some economic activities, as well as the right to explore and mine the undersea continental shelf.