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: Ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty will create a United Nations bureaucracy. Fact: Not true. Ratifying the LOTS creates nothing. Ratifying the treaty will give the United States a seat on the already-formed International Seabed Authority. The International Seabed Authority has existed for over 20 years. The ISA is the international authority that grants exploration and mining and drilling permits to all nations. The ISA also creates clear, legally binding, protocols for ships while navigating foreign waters. This is long established, current international law. The U.S. opting not to join the ISA does nothing except prevent America from receiving mining and drilling permits, while also creating a gray area legally for our military and for U.S. companies when dealing with waterways belonging to foreign nations. That is why every U.S. business association, including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and every sitting military leader of a U.S. Command – including the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air force and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - supports the treaty’s ratification.
The ISA, the institutional component that led the Reagan administration not to support the Convention in 1982, has remained a obstacle for a few vocal critics of the Convention in America. Although the ISA is the only new body created by the Convention that is explicitly authorized to make policy, its mandate is narrow, related to steps furthering security of tenure for those seeking to explore for minerals or mine on the seabed beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. The Part XI Implementation Agreement, which is now read together with the Convention to govern the ISA's operations, rectified all of the Reagan administration's objections to the original Part XI (the administration's only objections to the Convention). The objectionable provisions related to an asserted lack of guaranteed access for qualified private miners, the possibility of payments to national liberation movements, mandatory technology transfers, production limita- tions, and a review conference that could amend Part XI over the objection of the U.S. or other states. The George W. Bush administration has emphasized the 1994 changes with respect to these provisions. It has also emphasized 1994 changes concerning the U.S. role in how the ISA makes its decisions, changes that give the U.S. an effective veto over ISA decisions. Since its inception, the ISA has operated on a low budget and has confined its activities to its specified mandate, behavior that should reassure skeptics who fear an expensive, bloated international bureaucracy.
The critics seem naively to believe that America can simply shoot its way around the oceans, apparently including shooting our NATO allies, such as Canada, with whom we disagree about Arctic straits. Most shamefully, the critics repeat, despite all correction, that the Convention would turn the oceans over to the United Nations. But to the contrary, in its 200 nautical mile economic zones and extended coastal state continental shelves the Convention embodies one of the greatest expansions of national jurisdiction in history and absolutely nothing is turned over to the United Nations. Moreover, the closely cabined International Seabed Authority (ISA), necessary to create bankable property rights for seabed mining, only has jurisdiction over mineral resources of the seafloor in areas beyond national jurisdiction. Far from a menacing international agency poised to take over the world, after a quarter-century of operation the ISA has a staff of 39, considerably smaller than the staff of at least one of the domestic organizations most visibly opposing the Convention. The ISA is simply a small garden variety specialized international agency similar to many in which the United States participates, for example the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission. Even were the critics correct, United States non-adherence to the Convention would not in the slightest end the ISA or change the Convention which is one of the most widely adhered to in the world.