Professor of Law

Institute of International Shipping and Trade Law, Swansea University

Kriangsak Kittichaisaree. ISBN 139780198865292. Oxford (2021) xxii and 211pp. Hardback £62.16; paperback £19.99.

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea is a short, but important, new monograph on the procedural elements for state-to-state dispute resolution and the case law under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982), which entered into force on 16 November 1994. The author, Kriangsak Kittichaisaree, is a distinguished international law academic who has been a Member of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) since 1 October 2017. As such, he is well placed to expound this topic, although the author stresses that the book is not an official publication of ITLOS. The author has been able to share information from the research papers provided for judges of the Tribunal, but only where it is also intended to be accessible to the general public.

Chapter 1 deals with ITLOS and the dispute system under UNCLOS. Unlike many international Conventions, UNCLOS provides its own dispute system, aimed at achieving a uniform and effective interpretation of the treaty. This is achieved through two bodies, the International Seabed Authority (“The Authority”) and the International Tribunal for