Four conventions opened for signature in 1958 at the First United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I) are among provisions of international law taking effect in the South China Sea: the Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone, the Convention on the High Seas, the Convention on Fishing and Conservation of the Living Resources of the High Seas as well as the Convention on the Continental Shelf. Of particular interest, however, is the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, since it supersedes some of the older treaties and incorporates integral components of the 1958 conventions partly verbatim.
Soon after the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I), technological developments as well as undecided issues (“leftovers”) called for new regulations concerning maritime law. A second conference (UNCLOS II, 1960), however, ended without any formal agreement. Thus, in 1967, then-Maltese Ambassador to the United Nations Arvid Pardo, taking into account technological developments relating to deep-sea explorations of resources, growing pollution, and particularly the rising potential for conflict stemming from unsolved questions of maritime legal claims in the age of Cold War confrontation called for “an effective international regime over the seabed and the ocean floor beyond a clearly defined national jurisdiction” in his address to the General Assembly. When in 1982 the Third Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) presented its final document for signature after nine years of extensive negotiations, participating states had devised one of the most comprehensive agreements throughout international law which—upon its signing in 1982—has been labeled a “Constitution for the Oceans.”
Among the most fundamental provisions of the Convention, which entered into force in 1994, are the legal fixation of different maritime zones, their calculation, and states’ respective rights within them. The Convention, however, provides no provisions as to sovereignty rights and (conflicting) claims of sovereignty. Thus, while it remains “silent on sovereignty over legally defined features,” it contains many provisions as to how certain features are to be characterized and which maritime claims go along with them. On this account UNCLOS is “critically important” for the South China Sea dispute since, as Robert Beckman argues, four questions which are addressed in UNCLOS are among the central topics of relevance for the dispute:
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