International Law

The seas have historically performed two important functions: first, as a medium of communication; and, secondly, as a vast reservoir of resources, both living and non-living. Both of these functions have stimulated the development of legal rules. The fundamental principle governing the law of the sea is that ‘the land dominates the sea’ so that the land territorial situation constitutes the starting point for the determination of the maritime rights of a coastal state.

The seas were at one time thought capable of subjection to national sovereignties. The Portuguese in particular in the seventeenth century proclaimed huge tracts of the high seas as part of their territorial domain, but these claims stimulated a response by Grotius who elaborated the doctrine of the open seas, whereby the oceans as res communis international law were to be accessible to all nations but incapable of appropriation. This view prevailed, partly because it accorded with the interests of the North European states, which demanded freedom of the seas for the purposes of exploration and expanding commercial intercourse with the East.

The freedom of the high seas rapidly became a basic principle of international law, but not all the seas were so characterised. It was permissible for a coastal state to appropriate a maritime belt around its coastline as territorial waters, or territorial sea, and treat it as an indivisible part of its domain. Much of the history of the law of the sea has centred on the extent of the territorial sea or the precise location of the dividing line between it and the high seas and other recognised zones. The original stipulation linked the width of the territorial sea to the ability of the coastal state to dominate it by military means from the confines of its own shore. But the present century has witnessed continual pressure by states to enlarge the maritime belt and thus subject more of the oceans to their exclusive jurisdiction.

Beyond the territorial sea, other jurisdictional zones have been in process of development. Coastal states may now exercise particular jurisdictional functions in the contiguous zone, and the trend of international law today is moving rapidly in favour of even larger zones in which the coastal state may enjoy certain rights to the exclusion of other nations, such as fishery zones, continental shelves and, more recently, exclusive economic zones.