Dear Colleagues,
Any surveyor, cartographer or geodesist will not
provide geographical co-ordinates without specifying
first the datum the co-ordinates are related to.
Omitting this information would result in failing any
basic exam in this area of science.
It is like giving a price for an item without
specifying the currency. Who would buy ?
I cannot believe that during the weeks of the
preparation of the hearings in front of the ICJ,
nobody (especially the geographers or any expert in
the fields of the earth's science) in each team did
notice the missing of the datum used for drawing the
British Admiralty Chart 3433 annexed to the Maroua
declaration nor the missing of the datum in the
declaration's corpus itself.
I cannot imagine that during the hearings, the word
datum has never been pronounced at least once by any
of the parties.
I cannot think that, when in the brief Guillaume's
summary paragraph 3 : "... the Court drew an extremely
precise boundary between the two States" and in
paragraph 307 "...The Court, having carefully studied
a variety of charts, observes that the point on the
equidistance line which...", the court doesn't know
what means "extremely precise" and "carefully
studied".
Furthermore, I guess that someone in each party has
drawn those numerical maps the Court has scrutinized,
but today in any GIS or mapping software, you hare
forced to enter a datum (or at least a spheroid)
before starting any study.
So two questions are arising :
1 Do we really need this accuracy ? The answer is yes,
not because you can compute precisely the turning
points, but because unlike what was available in the
seventies, you can today positioning yourself (by GPS
for instance) offshore dynamically at less than five
meters (about a tenth of the second of arc). So for
leases including mineral deposits or oil and gas
potential existence, it is of the utmost importance to
know where is the borderline if two neighbouring
countries have to share a production of a reservoir
crossing the border.
So it was part of the job of the Court to assess the
accuracy of the turning points, and every party was
well aware of that and should have stressed this
point. An evidence of that is in the paragraph 307
where the Court changed the Longitude of point X by 4"
(that is around 120 m), a change less important in
quantity than a mistake induced by the use of a wrong
datum.
2 Is this blindness deliberate? We can only speculate
on what could be the reasons behind. Sometimes people
agree on something which is inapplicable because the
agreement includes two contrary propositions or
because the decree will never be enforced. Whatever
the reasons are, nobody wins or loses.
In this case, the attention was mostly drawn on the
problems of the Bakassi and Lake Tchad sovereignty.
My conclusion will be a question : What would have
happened if during the hearings someone - from the
Court or from the parties - objected that no datum
where specified on the maps or on the existent
treaties ? Would have been the hearings postponed
until this question was solved ?
Best Regards
Pierre Zakia
Surveyor - Cartographer
Former Chief of Topography and Cartography Database
Management – Elf Exploration Production
Individual GIS Expert agreed by the European
Commission
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