Trump last month signed an executive order to accelerate the permit-granting process for deep-sea mining in domestic and international waters, citing an obscure 1980 US law.
Ocean law is largely guided by that accord -- the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), first signed in 1982 to prevent “a competitive scramble for sovereign rights over the land underlying the world’s seas and oceans,“ according to Maltese diplomat Arvid Pardo, the convention’s forebearer.
Coalter Lathrop, an attorney at the US law firm Sovereign Geographic, told AFP that the United States is “a huge beneficiary of the parallel set of customary international law rules” despite not being a party to UNCLOS.
If the US enjoys the benefits of ocean law, Lathrop argues, “but then you disregard the other part of the package deal -- that the seabed and its minerals in areas beyond national jurisdiction are the common heritage of humankind -- that is going to be destabilizing, to say the least, for the general legal order of the oceans.”
'Unraveled'
ISA secretary general Leticia Carvalho expressed similar concern, saying that “any unilateral action... sets a dangerous precedent that could destabilize the entire system of global ocean governance.”
Guy Standing, an economist at the University of London, told AFP: “It’s the most dangerous thing he’s done so far,“ referring to Trump.
However, not all scholars in the field are in agreement.
“I just disagree with the people that are saying that it’s somehow a legal obligation to comply with a treaty that you never joined,“ he told AFP.
“I just can’t see any way that it’s unlawful. I understand that there’s sort of political opposition to it, but I would just distinguish between politics and the law.”
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