The Law of the Sea Progress and Prospects

It is now more than ten years since the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) came into force and more than twenty years since it was concluded in December of 1982 after more than nine years of negotiations. The famous "package deal"that it represented addressed many ofthe problematic issues that previous conventions had been unable to settle. This collection of essays, by leading academics and practitioners, provides a critical review of the LOSC and its relationship to and interface with the wide range of developments which have occurred since 1982. The individual chapters reveal a number of core themes, including the need to maintain the integrity of the LOSC and its centrality to oceans regulation; the tension between regional global regimes for oceans governance and the struggle to reconcile these within the LOSC; the gradual consolidationof authority over oceans space; the difficulty of adapting some of the more dated provisions of the LOSC to deal with unforeseen contemporary issues of oceans use; and the consequent development of the general obligations of the LOSC through binding and non-binding agreements. They clearly indicatethe potential impact and role of post-LOSC agreements and institutions in developing the law of the sea and resolving some of the outstanding substantive issues. From this it is clear that the future of the Law of the Sea will involve an understanding of the wider legal environment within which itoperates.

David Freestone currently works as Deputy General Counsel for Advisory Services at The World Bank in Washington DC. He held a personal chair in International Law at Hull from 1991 to 2002 and has been awarded an Honorary Chair. In 1986 he founded and is now Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the British Yearbook of International Law, the Yearbook of International Environmental Law and the Yearbook of European Environmental Law. His recent books include Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms. Making Kyoto Work (ed. with Charlotte Streck); Legislating for Sustainable Fisheries: A Guide to Implementing the 1993 FAO Compliance Agreement and the 1995 Fish Stocks Agreement (with William Edeson and Elly Gudmundsdottir); International Law and Sustainable Development (ed with Alan Boyle.) 1999 Dr Richard Barnes has been teaching maritime and international law at the University of Hull for a number of years. He is a member of the Society of Legal Scholars and convenor of its maritime law section. He is also a member of the International Law Association and a founding member of the McCoubrey Centre for International Law. Richard has been involved with the Council for Security and Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, and acted as its European Representative. More recently he has begun working with MarBEF, the EU Network of Excellence on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning. He is currently working on a DEFRA funded project to look at environmental indicators and a monograph on Property Rights and Natural Resources.
David Ong is curently Reader in the Department of Law, Essex University. He is widely published in the field of international environmental law and international law generally. He is a member of the ILA and is currently co-rapporteur for the ILA committee on Legal Issues of the Outer Continental Shelf.