US losing out on tangible opportunities to shape emerging maritime law and reclaim leadership role

There are tangible costs for the United States in not being a party to the Law of the Sea Convention. Until 1998, the United States was entitled to provisional membership in the meetings of the States party to the Convention, but since then it can be present only as an observer. Its non-accession has had and continues to have real costs. It is ineligible to nominate members to the Law of the Sea Tribunal; it has forfeited (as of March 2007) the opportunity to nominate members to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf until the next election in 2012,58 and it cannot occupy its guaranteed seat on the Council of the Seabed Authority and the powerful Finance Committee. The marine scientific research institutions continue to suffer from long delays in gaining approval for research in foreign EEZs, which would be alleviated by the Convention's implied consent provisions were the United States a party. Perhaps as damaging as the concrete benefits of the Convention previously discussed is the harm to the credibility of the United States in international relations by failing to accede to the Convention. After all, we laid out before the world in President Reagan's 1982 statements our objections to the Convention and what would be required for the United States to become a party. By adopting the 1994 Agreement, the international community gave us what we demanded as conditions for our accession, and now, thirteen years later, the United States has still not become a party.