The government of Barbados has announced that it is referring its
maritime boundary dispute with Trinidad & Tobago to the International
Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).
Barbados has stated that the 1990 maritime boundary agreement between
Trinidad & Tobago and Venezuela "purports unilaterally to appropriate to
Venezuela and Trinidad & Tobago an enormous part of Barbados's and
Guyana's maritime territory". The dispute has had practical implications
in terms of fishing rights, and Barbadian fishermen operating south of
the 1990 line have been arrested and fined by Trinidad & Tobago
authorities.
Barbados is taking the dispute to ITLOS under the binding dispute
resolution procedures set out in the 1982 United Nations Convention on
the Law of the Sea. It will be the first boundary case heard by the
Tribunal. The two governments are meeting today (18 February) "to
determine whether both parties may want to vary, by mutual agreement,
any of the procedural rules of Annex VII of UNCLOS and, further, to make
every effort to enter into provisional arrangements of a practical
nature, without prejudice to the final delimitation, relating to
traditional fishing as conducted by Barbadians to the north of the
territorial sea of the island of Tobago".
(Summarised from a report by the Caribbean Media Corporation news
agency, Bridgetown [BBC Mon LA1 LatPol j])
m a r t i n
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Martin Pratt
Director of Research
International Boundaries Research Unit
Department of Geography
University of Durham
South Road
Durham DH1 3LE
United Kingdom
+44 (0)191 334 1964 (direct line)
+44 (0)191 334 1962 (fax)
[log in to unmask] (email)
http://www-ibru.dur.ac.uk (World Wide Web)
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