The Law of the Sea, a Litigator's Dream
There is no reason to tie freedom of navigation to financial redistribution, environmental protection or the empowerment of judicial politicians.
LOST is not all bad. But there never was any reason, other than Third World politics, to tie navigational freedom to financial redistribution. Or to empower judicial politicians in other lands to override U.S. law.
Once litigation starts, no one knows where it will end. The UN’s Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea declared that the treaty is not “a static instrument, but rather a dynamic and evolving body of law that must be vigorously safeguarded and its implementation aggressively advanced.”
A “dynamic and evolving body of law” that is “aggressively advanced” by political activists and international jurists around the world. What possibly could go wrong? The U.S. Senate should carefully ponder that question before ratifying LOST.
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he served as a Deputy Representative to the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.
Image: Flickr/ Robin Alasdair Frederick Hutton. CC BY 2.0.