U.S. could rely on bilateral treaties as an alternative to UNCLOS regime
The United States can successfully pursue its national interests regarding its extended continental shelf by negotiating on a bilateral basis with nations with which it shares maritime borders to delimit and mutually recognize each other’s maritime and ECS boundaries.
Quicktabs: Arguments
Yet history has repeatedly and definitively debunked the notion that recognition of U.S. ECS claims is contingent on U.S. membership in UNCLOS or on the approval of an international commission. To the contrary, through bilateral treaties with the Cook Islands, Cuba, Mexico, Russia, the united Kingdom, and Venezuela, the United States has successfully established its various maritime boundaries and the limits of its continental shelf and ECS.
The United States has also acted unilaterally through presidential proclamations and acts of Congress to set its maritime boundaries and lay claim to the natural resources within its maritime zones and continental shelf:
- In 1945, President Harry Truman issued two proclamations. The first, the Policy of the United States with Respect to the Natural Resources of the Subsoil and Sea Bed of the Continental Shelf, claimed jurisdiction and control over the natural resources of the U.S. continental shelf.27 Truman’s second proclamation established a conservation zone for U.S. fishery resources contiguous to the U.S. coast.28
- In 1953, Congress codified Truman’s continental shelf proclamation by enacting the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which declared that “the subsoil and seabed of the outer Continental Shelf appertain to the United States and are subject to its jurisdiction, control, and power of disposition.”29
- In 1983, in the wake of his decision not to sign UNCLOS, President Reagan proclaimed the existence of “an exclusive economic Zone in which the United States will exercise sovereign rights in living and nonliving resources within 200 nautical miles of its coast.”30 In 1988, Reagan followed up his EEZ proclamation by extending the breadth of the U.S. territorial sea from 3 nm to 12 nm.31
- In 1999, building on Reagan’s maritime proclamations, President Bill Clinton extended the U.S. contiguous zone from 9 nm to 24 nm.32 No nation or group of nations, much less the “international community” as a whole, has objected to or otherwise challenged the unilateral proclamations by Presidents Truman, Reagan, and Clinton. No nation disputes that the United States has a 12 nm territorial sea, a 24 nm contiguous zone, a 200 nm EEZ, or jurisdiction and control over the natural resources of its continental shelf and ECS. In fact, foreign nations recognize and respect U.S. maritime claims and boundaries, and vice versa, as long as those claims and boundaries conform to widely accepted international law, including provisions of customary international law reflected in UNCLOS.
Finally, one unique course may be to avoid a solution under public international law entirely, and instead, the Arctic coastal states may find a remedy through private international law, perhaps through the humble bilateral investment treaty. Interestingly, private enterprise has accommodated for an increasingly volatile environment of energy exploitation—an environment in which investors have grappled with governmental expropriation, unilateral changes to the tax regime, or other sources of economic and political instability.131 If the coastal states were to enter into a bilateral investment treaty specifically for the benefit of the oil and gas industry, the diplomatic negotiations over such a treaty may accomplish what an ATS-style structure, the CLCS, or any one of the formalists' legal “solutions” never could: provide the Arctic with a stable legal regime. Because bilateral investment treaties often include dispute resolution, security, investment protections, and a host of other facilitating mechanisms, many of the Arctic's chilling effects on energy development may be avoided.132 While the exact nature of such a bilateral investment treaty is beyond the scope of this Article, an agreement under private international law could be a plausible way forward.