Stephen Fietta

A Practitioner's Guide to Maritime Boundary Delimitation

This book provides a user-friendly and practical guide to the modern law of maritime boundary delimitation. The law of maritime boundaries has seen substantial evolution in recent decades. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the law in this field, and its development through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which set out the framework of the modern law in 1982. The Convention itself has since been substantially built upon and clarified by a series of judicial and arbitral decisions in boundary disputes between sovereign states, which themselves also built upon earlier case law. The book dissects each of the leading international judgments and awards since the North Sea Continental Shelf Cases in 1969, providing a full analysis of the issues and context in each case, explaining their fundamental importance to shaping the law. The book provides over forty clear technical illustrations prepared by Robin Cleverly, one of the leading technical experts in international dispute resolution, to carefully demonstrate the key issues at stake in this complex area of law. Technological developments in the exploitation of maritime natural resources (including oil and gas) have provided a significant impetus for recent boundary disputes, as they have made the resources found in remote areas of the ocean and seabed more accessible. However, these resources cannot effectively be exploited at the moment, as hundreds of maritime boundaries worldwide remain undelimited. The book therefore complements the legal considerations raised with substantial technical input. It also identifies key issues in maritime delimitation which have yet to be resolved, and sets out the possible future direction the law may take in resolving them. It will be an unique and valuable resource for lawyers involved in cases involving maritime delimitation, and scholars and students of the law of the sea.