territorial waters

territorial waters, that area of sea adjacent to a nation's coasts which is under the full control of that nation. It was a contentious issue for centuries, and books like Mare Clausum were written about it. Eventually a suggestion put forward by the Dutch jurist Cornelis van Bynkershoek (1673–1743), in his book De Dominio Maris (On the Dominion of the Sea), published in 1703, was adopted. He proposed that a nation should exercise dominion over the adjacent seas only to the extent that it could defend them from the shore. This was taken as the existing range of a cannon, and agreed to be 3 miles (5 km). However, it took until 1822 for this to be formally agreed when France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain signed the North Sea Fisheries Convention at The Hague. It was also agreed that waters outside this limit should be open to all ships without hindrance.

After the Second World War (1939–45) this limit was challenged by a number of maritime nations. In 1945 the US President, Harry Truman, stated that his country had the right to the offshore oil and gas resources on its continental shelf, an entirely new concept. A number of countries followed suit and others began to claim extended limits, too, mainly to preserve to themselves their inshore fisheries. When Iceland extended its territorial limits to 19 kilometres (12 mls.) in 1958 it sparked with Britain the first of three confrontations, known as the ‘cod wars’, before most nations eventually accepted this distance as marking territorial waters. However, as fish stocks dwindled, the pressure was on to extend the limits still further, and in February 1976, following Iceland's decision to extend its limits to 320 kilometres (200 mls.), the European Economic Community established a similar European zone, and soon afterwards most maritime nations followed suit. In 1994 the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) introduced the Exclusive Economic Zone and codified territorial waters as 12 nautical miles, though in 1999 US agencies were ordered to enforce US law up to double that distance. UNCLOS also confirmed the right of a ship on innocent passage to pass through the territorial waters of another nation.