The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf

The establishment of commissions tasked to deal principally with the technical aspects of land boundary-making or frontier delineation had been done. In the past,³⁰⁸ the establishment of commissions in this spirit was not unusual. But the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf differs from other technical boundary commissions. It is the only technical and scientific commission of its kind that is established by a multilateral convention with the principal mandate of evaluating claims for a continental shelf beyond 200 nm.

This Chapter will examine the Commission from the perspective of the law of international institutions. The term “law of international institutions” as used here does not refer to a single law.³⁰⁹ There is no single law that governs international institutions as such. The nature of “international institutions” precisely rules out such a possibility. As a rule, international institutions are created for a particular purpose. Their constituent instruments dictate what international institutions do and to what extent. How much they differ from each other, international institutions also share many common elements that enable one to assess them in an organized manner. These common elements include issues of legal personality or status, membership, financing, accountability, organizational structure, and rule-making capacity. The approach used by many scholars who study the law of international institutions is twofold: firstly, they look at the particular law of the institution and secondly, they undertake a study of the issues concerning the institution by comparing them with other institutions.³¹⁰ The Commission is reviewed using the same approach.