The round of applause which broke out among the delegates from some 151 countries present, in New York on Friday, Apr. 30, 1982, at the 11th session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) signalled the end of eight years hard bargaining—the goal for which the delegates had strived so assiduously to attain had finally been reached: the adoption of an international convention establishing new rules for the use and exploitation of the sea and the sea bed.

The applause did not, however, signify a triumphant consensual end to the tortuous negotiations, for the adoption of the Convention was overshadowed by the many abstentions (17, in a group which included the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Italy and West Germany) and, perhaps more ominously, by the United States voting against it.

There is a new Convention on the law of the sea; it is a “huge” Convention with some 320 Articles and eight annexes covering the legal regime of the sea in extenso. But the law will not change overnight; entry into force of the Convention awaits its ratification by the governments of 60 nations—during the “waiting period” the present law will be followed, with perhaps a few States incorporating (unilaterally) some of the Articles into their domestic legislation.

The seed of UNCLOS was sown at the United Nations as long ago as 1967 when Dr Arvid Pardo of Malta, who was concerned, as were many others, at the possible colonisation of the deep-sea bed by the metalliferous-nodule hunting nations, asked that the sea bed of the high seas be declared “the common heritage of mankind” to be administered under the jurisdiction of an international agency.

This “common heritage” concept met with wide approval; the 1958 Conventions governing the law of the sea in 1967 (and which remain in force in 1982) make no provision for a legal regime to regulate the exploration and exploitation of the deep-sea bed—the subject was not included in the 1958 discussions on the law of the sea as it was said to be “… too premature and too impractical for detailed regulations”. But in 1967 it was already becoming technologically and commercially feasible to exploit the bed of the high seas. A legal regime for the continental shelf had been formulated in 1958 (the Continental Shelf Convention); but the formula proved to be inadequate in its definition of the continental shelf:—“… to a depth of 200 metres or beyond that limit, to where the depth of the superadjacent waters admits of exploitation of the natural resources”.