Law of the Sea: Future Magna Carta?

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): At the same time it saber rattles over American accusations of trade piracy, China has intimated that next month it will ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which will bind it, in effect, to do away with much of China's present outlaw status on matters of sovereignty over the sea. This is typical China -- hot and cold, sweet and sour, confrontational one moment, accommodating the next. No wonder that President Bill Clinton finds it difficult to get a fix.

Beijing, even at its sunniest, rarely wins many points for presentation. Provocation is its second name. Hence the standing committee of the Chinese parliament has wrapped its ratification announcement in a message that Chinese jurisdiction over the sea will be expanded by nearly 1 million square miles. It also promised better protection for China's island resources, including the oil-rich Spratly Islands, over which six countries, not least China, have been sparring.

However, aficionados of the Law of the Sea, those who have long recognized the document as a good way to avoid many a future war, are well aware that for all the Chinese bluster, what they are now prepared to sign their name to is going to significantly tie their hands.

A reading of the small print of the Chinese statement makes it clear that this extra million square miles is nothing more than what the convention legally gives them -- the right to establish a 200-mile exclusive economic zone off the nation's coast, instead of the old traditional limit of 12 miles. But as this 200 miles is open to international passage, overflight and the laying of pipelines, it falls far short of sovereignty.

On the island issue, there may be some ambiguity since Beijing is claiming "historic waters". Yet last year, reversing its earlier stance, Beijing agreed to refer the South China Sea question to a meeting of officials of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next month. Moreover, the implication of signing the Law of the Sea suggests it accepts international arbitration in disputed cases.

The political paradox, however, is that while China is going ahead shedding its pirate's patch on this issue, lending its vote to a rather important extension of international law, the U.S. and many of the countries of the European Union are still dragging their feet. And thereby hangs a tale.

When the Law of the Sea was first mooted in the 1970s, who were its most enthusiastic proponents? Of course most of Europe and the presidency of Richard Nixon. Yet today, Britain, for example, is "waiting for parliamentary time" for ratification and the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee which has the authority to send it to the floor of the Senate for ratification has left it languishing, year in, year out, in its in-tray. The committee's chairman, Senator Jesse Helms, says his spokesman, "has no intention ever of presenting it for ratification." Clinton, surprisingly, given his obsession with Chinese trade issues, has not taken time to give it a push.

This is a leftover from the Reagan administration that stalled the momentum generated by his predecessors, despite the earnest pleadings of the U.S. chiefs of staff who could see what a trouble-avoiding good deal it is.

The Law of the Sea Convention is a bargain in every way. First, because it puts a stop to what looked like becoming an undisciplined lunge towards 200-mile territorial zones. All existing claims to territorial jurisdiction greater than 12 miles have now got to be rolled back. And written into international law is the right to free and unimpeded passage through the 100 or so straits that are narrower than 24 miles.

But it is also a bargain in another sense because it gives landlocked nations and poorer Third World nations equal rights to access, along with the maritime industrialized countries, to the vast mineral deposits that lie on the ocean floor outside the 200-mile economic zones.

President Richard Nixon, who was instrumental in starting the Law of the Sea negotiations, called the seas "the common heritage of mankind." If only Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Jesse Helms had the same earnest perspective. The Law of the Sea could in its own way be a Magna Carta for the 21st century. It will be a great moral opportunity missed if Beijing beats Washington in the ratification stakes.