Barbados/Trinidad and Tobago. Award on Jurisdiction and Merits. At <http://www.pca-cpa.org/ENGLISH/RPC/>, available at 45 ILM 800 (2006).

UN Convention on the Law of the Sea Annex VII Arbitral Tribunal, April 11, 2006.

The dispute addressed in the Barbados/Trinidad and Tobago arbitration emerged during nine rounds of negotiations concerning delimitation of die maritime boundary in the western, central, and eastern sectors of their overlapping claims to the continental shelf and 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Caribbean Sea (five rounds), along with associated questions posed by the continuing access for Barbadian fisherfolk to flying fish stocks south of a prospective equidistance line in the western sector (four rounds). In February 2004, according to Barbados, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago declared the issue of the maritime boundary “intractable” (para. 56) and invited Barbados to proceed, if it so wished, with arbitration. Barbados then invoked the compulsory arbitration provisions of Part XV, Section 2, of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention). Upon its establishment, the Annex VII Barbados/Trinidad and Tobago Arbitral Tribunal [Tribunal], which comprised President Stephen M. Schwebel and arbitrators Ian Brownlie, Vaughan A. Lowe, Francisco Orrego Vicuña, and Sir Arthur Watts, adopted its Rules of Procedure and issued four orders by year's end. After joining Trinidad and Tobago's preliminary objections to the merits phase, the Tribunal held hearings in London on October 17-28,2005. The vital interests of the two states in valuable oil and fishery resources were reflected in the high intensity of the factual and legal (both procedural and substantive) contentions forcefully disputed by the parties as represented by leading international counsel, and a number of procedurally incidental issues arose in the context of the proceedings’ confidentiality and the treatment of evidence.

The article surveys the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines v. Guinea M/V Saiga cases which inaugurated jurisprudence of the 21 Member International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg, Germany, with delivery of two important decisions on prompt release of the vessel and its crew (1997, Case No. 1) and on provisional measures of protection (1998, Case No. 2). The decisions provided precedential instances of application by the Tribunal of Articles 292 and 290 of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea respectively, and of the relevant provisions of the ITLOS Rules. The prescription of provisional measures of protection formed the incidental proceedings of the pending M/V Saiga (Merits) case which is to be settled by ITLOS in mid-1999 (Case No. 2) and is to be the subject of a separate article. In view of the ITLOS Statute and the Rules being closely modelled in the Statute and the Rules of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), careful attention is given to comparison of the inaugural practice of ITLOS with the longstanding practice of the ICJ, and preservation of judicial consistency by ITLOS is particularly commended. A history of the M/V Saiga dispute, intertwined with domestic proceedings before Guinean courts, is for the reader's convenience outlined in a Chronological Table annexed to this article.

Fisheries Jurisdiction (Spain v. Canada), Jurisdiction.

International Court of Justice, December 4, 1998.

On May 10, 1994, Canada filed an amended declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). New paragraph 2(d) excluded “disputes arising out of or concerning conservation and management measures taken by Canada with respect to vessels fishing in die NAFO Regulatory Area, as defined in the Convention on Future Multilateral Cooperation in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries, 1978, and the enforcement of such measures.” Two days later, the Canadian Coastal Fisheries Protection Act (CFPA) and implementing regulations were amended to authorize the enforcement under certain circumstances of conservation measures applicable to foreign fishing vessels in the high seas areas to which the reservation adverted.

Article 121 of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention) retains the traditional definition of an island as: ‘a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high-tide’ (paragraph 1), and attributes to it the same maritime spaces as the mainland. These spaces are at present: the 12 mile territorial sea (TS), the 24 mile contiguous zone (CZ), the continental shelf (CS) and the 200 mile exclusive economic (or fishery) zone (EEZ) (paragraph 2). However, unlike the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea which gives the same legal status to all natural islands, paragraph 3 of Article 121 limits the legal entitlement of islands to maritime spaces by providing that:

‘Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf’.