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Friday, August 29, 2014
Somalia instituted proceedings against Kenya on August 28 with the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the UN, with regard to “a dispute concerning maritime delimitation in the Indian Ocean.” In its application, which is accompanied by three sketch-maps, Somalia contends that both States “disagree about the location of the maritime boundary in the area where their maritime entitlements overlap,” and asserts that “diplomatic negotiations, in which their respective views have been fully exchanged, have failed to resolve this disagreement.”
The maritime border in question is seeing exploration by international firms who were awarded access to the acreage by Kenya. Somalia has long maintained that the blocks awarded were in its portion of the Indian Ocean.
Somalia went on to request that the ICJ “determine, on the basis of international law, the complete course of the single maritime boundary dividing all the maritime areas appertaining to Somalia and to Kenya in the Indian Ocean, including the continental shelf beyond 200 [nautical miles].” It also asks the ICJ “to determine the precise geographical coordinates of the single maritime boundary in the Indian Ocean.”
The Somali government believes that the maritime boundary between it and Kenya in the territorial sea, exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and continental shelf should be established in accordance with, respectively, Articles 15, 74 and 83 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Somalia explains that, accordingly, the boundary line in the territorial sea “should be a median line as specified in Article 15, since there are no special circumstances that would justify departure from such a line,” and that in the EEZ and continental shelf, the boundary “should be established according to the three-step process the Court has consistently employed in its application of Articles 74 and 83.”
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