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Convention on the Continental Shelf

1958 international treaty

Summary

1958 international treaty

Field	Value
name	Convention on the Continental Shelf
image	UNCLOS logo.svg
image_width	150px
date_signed	29 April 1958
location_signed	Geneva, Switzerland
date_effective	10 June 1964
signatories	43
parties	58
languages	Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish
footnotes	legal.un.org/
wikisource	Convention on the Continental Shelf

The global continental shelf, highlighted in cyan}}

The Convention on the Continental Shelf was an international treaty created to codify the rules of international law relating to continental shelves. The treaty, after entering into force 10 June 1964, established the rights of a sovereign state over the continental shelf surrounding it, if there be any. The treaty was one of three agreed upon at the first United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I).{{cite web |access-date=3 December 2025 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220722002553/https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/8_1_1958_continental_shelf.pdf |archive-date=22 July 2022

The treaty dealt with seven topics: the regime governing the superjacent waters and airspace; laying or maintenance of submarine cables or pipelines; the regime governing navigation, fishing, scientific research and the coastal state's competence in these areas; delimitation; tunneling.{{cite book

Historical background

The Convention on the Continental Shelf replaced the earlier practice of nations having sovereignty over only a very narrow strip of the sea surrounding them, with anything beyond that strip considered International Waters.{{cite web |access-date=22 September 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220915020937/https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/convention_historical_perspective.htm |archive-date=15 September 2022 |url-status=live}} This policy was used until President of the United States Harry S. Truman proclaimed that the resources on the continental shelf contiguous to the United States belonged to the United States through an Executive Order on 28 September 1945.{{cite web |access-date=22 September 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220407100229/http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/450928a.html |archive-date=7 April 2022 |url-status=live}} Many other nations quickly adapted similar policies, most stating that their portion of the sea extended either 12 or 200 nautical miles from its coast.

Rights of states

Article 1 of the convention defined the term shelf in terms of exploitability rather than relying upon the geological definition. It defined a shelf "to the seabed and subsoil of the submarine areas adjacent to the coast but outside the area of the territorial sea, to a depth of 200 meters or, beyond that limit, to where the depth of the superjacent waters admits of the exploitation of the natural resources of the said areas" or "to the seabed and subsoil of similar submarine areas adjacent to the coasts of islands".{{cite book | url-access = registration

Besides outlining what is legal in continental shelf areas, it also dictated what could not be done in Article 5.

Participants

UNCLOS II and III

In 1960, the United Nations held another conference regarding the Laws of the Sea, UNCLOS II, but no agreements were reached. However, another conference was called in 1973 to address the issues. UNCLOS III, which lasted until 1982 due to a required consensus, adjusted and redefined many principles stated in the first UNCLOS. The new definition of the Continental shelf in the new Convention rendered the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf obsolete. The principal reason for this was technological advancements.{{cite news

References

"Fishing".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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