Il Tribunale Internazionale del Diritto del Mare: Genesi, Organizzazione e Competenza

Abstract

In the present thesis I will conduct an analysis of the role of the International Tribunal for the Law of Sea in the international system for the peaceful settlement of disputes. Among the goals I have established myself is to describe the origins and the organization of this international judicial institution. For this purpose, I will consider the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was signed at Montego Bay, Jamaica, on 10 December 1982, and entered into force 12 years later, on 16 November 1994, and the subsequent Agreement relating to the implementation of Part XI of the Convention, which was adopted on 28 July 1994 and entered into force on 28 July 1996. This Agreement and Part XI of the Convention are to be interpreted and considered as a single instrument and both, together with the Convention, will be indicated in this work as “the Convention”, despite the number of States Parties differ, i.e., 150 for the Agreement and 168 for the Convention. However, I will focus above all on Part XV of the Convention, which contains the provisions for the peaceful settlement of disputes and on Annex VI of the Convention, for the reason that they provide the basis for the establishment of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (hereinafter “the Tribunal”). Moreover, as already stated by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution 54/31 of 16 November 1999, I will argue about the importance and role played by the Tribunal. Finally, I will juxtapose to the doctrinal and theoretical part, which deals with the general aspects of the law of the sea and of the Tribunal, the analysis of an empirical case: the accident that involved the Italian oil tanker “Enrica Lexie” and the Indian fishing boat “St. Antony”. In the first part, I will report a brief introduction to the law of the sea. In particular, I will analyse the following points: the historical evolution of international law of the sea from the principle of freedom of the seas to the Geneva Conventions of 1958; the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea and the 1982 Montego Bay Convention; the regulation of the contiguous zone between internal practices and conventional regimes; the "sovereign rights" recognized to the coastal State within the exclusive economic zone; the discipline of the continental shelf in the light of the most significant principles developed in this regard by the International Court of Justice and by the European Union Court of Justice; and the marine pollution and international rules of responsibility: the regime outlined by the Montego Bay Convention. In the second part, I will introduce the object of my work, namely the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea: its composition and proceedings. Particularly, I will focus on the composition of the Tribunal; the institutions that have access to these bodies; the instituting proceedings under the jurisdiction of the Tribunal; and the attribution of jurisdiction to the Tribunal. The third part is about the Tribunal and its competences, i.e., the types of disputes in which the Tribunal operates; the jurisdiction of the Tribunal established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; the jurisdiction of the Chamber for the settlement of disputes. In the fourth and final part of my work, I will analyse a case study: The Italian-Indian dispute over the Marò case.