What is the difference in the international court of justice ICJs Essay

What is the difference in the international court of justice ICJs approach with respect to the law of maritime delimitations between the North Sea Continental - Essay Example Disputes are provided for through a separate optional protocol, parties to the Convention are obliged to exhaust the settlement procedure, preferably through direct talks between the parties. If direct negotiation fails, then the parties can submit the dispute to either the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Court of Justice, binding international arbitration procedures or an expert arbitration tribunal. The decisions of the ICJ have spelt out the principle to be found in the Ad Hoc Committee Report, which states that there is â€Å"an area of the sea bed and the ocean floor underlying the high seas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.†1 This falls under the Common Heritage of Mankind principle, adopted without dissent in the United Nations General Assembly and applied to the sea bed beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (Brown, 1994:262). Therefore, this has spelt out an important principle of maritime delimitation, whereby in some in stances it may not be possible for a coastal state to claim maritime territory, which may more appropriately fall within the scope of international jurisdiction and therefore unavailable to any State in particular. The emergence of the EEZ concept and further seaward extension of the outer limit of the continental shelf has focused attention on maritime boundary delimitation in contemporary international law. Equity now plays a greater role in interstate relations and the pragmatic issues of managing the delimitation of natural resources and boundaries. In so far as delimitation of the territorial sea is concerned, the UN Convention of the Sea states that when two countries are adjacent to or opposite to each other, neither one is entitled to â€Å"extend its territorial sea beyond the median line every point of which is equidistant from the nearest points on the baselines from