Voting peculiarities of ITLOS do not inspire confidence that US would not be overruled

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea is supposed to offer dispassionate adjudication of disputes. Yet membership is decided by quota: each “geographical group” is to have at least three representatives.29 That is a modest improvement over the original scheme: five members each for Africa and Asia, four each for the “Western European and Others Group” and Latin America, and three for Eastern Europe. The voting system has been improved, but the changes are inadequate. According to the revised treaty, the United States would be guaranteed a seat on the council, though still not a veto. The 36-member council is divided into four chambers of varying size, with members chosen from minerals consumers, seabed investors, minerals producers, developing nations, and others, respectively. The United States could be elected in any one of the first three chambers but is promised a seat in the first one (for minerals producers). Since Washington has not ratified the treaty, the United States is currently not a member of the council. If the United States did ratify the treaty, however, and took its seat in the council, a majority of members voting no in any one of the four chambers could block action. On matters of serious interest, the United States probably could win the necessary votes to form a majority in its chamber, but not necessarily. The career foreign service officers likely to represent most nations in the ISA would not want to be forever known as obstructionists. Moreover, this purely negative veto power does not guarantee that the ISA would act when required, and could be used by other countries to delay or impede the approval of mining applications, for instance.