UNCLOS is not administered by the United Nations
The United Nations has virtually no role in management, implementation, or execution of this treaty. It remains in the convention’s title only because the treaty was initially negotiated at the United Nations. In addition, the only international organization UNCLOS creates (the International Seabed Authority) is no different from the hundreds of other international organizations the U.S. is already party to, including the U.S.- Canadian Fisheries Convention or the International Maritime Organization.
Quicktabs: Arguments
Myth: The convention "is designed to place fishing rights, deep-sea mining, global pollution and more under the control of a new global bureaucracy ..." (13) This is so erroneous that it would he humorous were it not so insistently advanced by critics. The executive branch, which led U.S. negotiations on the convention and supports the Senate's advice and consent, would never have supported such nonsense. The ISA deals solely with mineral resources beyond national jurisdiction, not with fishing, global pollution or navigation, nor with activities in the water column. If U.S. mining firms are ever to mine the deep seabed, particularly sites under no nation's ownership, it is necessary to create enforceable rights to this end. The United States is already party to hundreds of specialized international organizations. The ISA would be an unremarkable addition, one that after 11 years of operation currently has a staff of 28.
Critics also argue that the convention will turn the world's oceans over to the United Nations. The United Nations has no decisional authority over any oceans issue in the convention, nor does the treaty create another UN agency. Rather, the three strictly limited organizations that the convention does create report to the state parties to the treaty, not to the United Nations. As with many U.S. arms control agreements, the negotiations proceeded under UN auspices, but the United Nations had no hand in developing the convention. And the negotiations leading to the convention were supported by the United States precisely because of its strategic and resource-based interests at sea. The real threat to these interests has been unbridled coastal state "unilateralism," sometimes referred to as "creeping jurisdiction."11 This is a threat for which multilateral negotiations provided the best forum for protecting core U.S. oceans interests.
Those who practice and profess international law should be profoundly grateful for this political moment. We can (and must) seek to inform the public about the realities of the institutional and dispute-settlement regimes in UNCLOS. The truth is, of course, that UNCLOS has relatively weak features in this regard, especially compared with such institutions as the WTO. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) will have virtually no docket of cases, aside from applications for prompt release of vessels and crews and the occasional matter regarding fishing rights.19 The vast majority of disputes under UNCLOS will be resolved by ad hoc arbitrators, hand-picked by the parties.20 Likewise, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is likely to be a rather sclerotic organization, given its limited mandate (with the modifications made to Part XI in 1994)21 until such time (if ever) that deep seabed mining for manganese nodules has even the remote prospect of profitability. Ironically, the work of one UNCLOS institution that does bear attention – the Continental Shelf Commission, which is the technical body that will rule on any U.S. application to extend its claims in the Arctic – has not yet been fully evaluated. As for the “international tax” that the ISA will assess on continental shelf oil and gas production beyond 200 nautical miles,22 that provision, ironically, was based on a proposal made by the Nixon Administration as an alternative to the cumbersome regime for manganese nodules.23