Description
Continental shelves became a legal and political reality with the signing of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The United Nations Commission on the limits of the continental shelf (CLCS) has been charged with issuing recommendations to establish limits on coastal states’ continental shelf. The implementation of these recommendations is left to sovereign states. For the cases where overlapping claims exist between two or more states or there is disagreement with the CLCS’s recommendations, negotiations between states must happen to resolve disputes.
Hence, the legitimacy of the CLCS is pivotal for its recommendations to be well received by states. This communication will focus on how sovereign states reacted in 31 cases of CLCS’s recommendations to assess if the CLCS is well perceived by states. The communication will then focus into the potential of the CLCS for promoting peace and strengthening international law and evaluated how it could be upgraded to better serve states.
