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Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights pp 1–6Cite as

The Law of the Sea Convention: Lasting Paradigm of Territory

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Arguably the most important achievements of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC), which entered into force in 1994, are its comprehensiveness and flexibility (Churchill 2015, 45). Establishing itself as “constitution for the oceans” (Koh 1982, xxxiii), it divides the ocean in defined maritime zones, in which coastal sovereignty is decreasing the further one is from the coast. Coastal states can claim a territorial sea up to 12 nautical miles from its low-water baseline (LOSC, Art. 3) and a contiguous zone up to 24 nautical miles from that same line (LOSC, Art. 33). In addition, coastal states can claim up to 200 nautical miles of exclusive economic zone (LOSC, Art. 57). A special regime applies to archipelagic states (LOSC, Part IV) and straits (LOSC, Part III). Furthermore, a coastal state has internal waters landward from its baseline (LOSC, Art. 8) and rights over its continental shelf (LOSC, Part VI). Beyond these zones, it is known as the...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law, Walther Schücking Institute for International Law, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

    Erik van Doorn

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  1. Erik van Doorn
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Correspondence to Erik van Doorn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Studies, Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Michael Kocsis

Section Editor information

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Kevin W. Gray

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van Doorn, E. (2020). The Law of the Sea Convention: Lasting Paradigm of Territory. In: Kocsis, M. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68846-6_27-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68846-6_27-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68846-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68846-6

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