Law of the Sea Conference Term Analysis

The Law of the Sea Conference was a drawn-out but deeply influential negotiation that lasted from 1974 to 1982 and ultimately led to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which regulates nations’ claims to territorial waters and ability to conduct economic activity on the high seas. Although some countries have yet to ratify the treaty and new negotiations have created updated agreements from time to time, the 1982 agreement remains an important baseline for maritime policy. In Getting to Yes, the authors look specifically at the negotiations over deep-sea mining rights, which their Harvard Negotiation Project colleague James Sebenius wrote about in Negotiating the Law of the Sea (1984). Specifically, the authors note that wealthy countries like the United States wanted to give large corporations unrestricted mining rights in international waters, whereas developing countries like India were worried that this would lead them to fall even further behind. India demanded that corporations pay a fee for mining rights, and the United States refused—but after reviewing a model developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both sides were able to come to a common agreement. This illustrates the value of focusing negotiations on objective criteria—but there were also significant mistakes in the Law of the Sea Conference. For instance, when the bloc of lesser-developed countries asked the industrialized countries to share technology with them, the industrialized countries quickly agreed, but then totally ignored the issue. The authors note that it would have been much better for the developed countries to go into detail on this point, thereby developing trust and goodwill to bolster their negotiations in the future.