Issues associated with the implementation of Article 82 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

Potential claims to Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) areas under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, may eventually cover more than 15 million Square Kilometres of seabed. Under Article 82 of the Convention, a portion of the revenue from the extraction of non-living resources on the OCS must be disbursed through the International Seabed Authority ‘on the basis of equitable sharing criteria, taking into account the interests and needs of developing States, particularly the least developed and the land-locked among them’. Responsibility for the implementation of Article 82 rests with the Authority and with States that exploit the non-living resources of the OCS. However, Article 82 does not address many of the specifics of how this is to be accomplished and therefore careful consideration is required of the obligation, principles and criteria for distribution of benefits, procedural aspects, the role of the Authority, the role of OCS States, and economic and temporal issues. To begin to answer these, and other, questions around the interpretation and application of Article 82, the Authority, in conjunction with the Energy, Environment and Development Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in the United Kingdom, convened a seminar for a group of invited experts to discuss the issues associated with Article 82. The present report, which examines the legal and policy issues associated with the implementation of Article 82, was originally prepared as a background paper for the seminar, and was subsequently extensively revised to take into account the views expressed by participants in the seminar.