92 



Sharp : 



Revelle: 



Sharp: 

 Revelle: 

 Sharp: 

 Revelle: 



Sharp: 

 Revelle: 



the United Nations should take very seriously how it can be 

 developed as the common heritage of mankind. The United 

 Nations then formed a committee. 



The Committee on Peaceful Uses of the Seabed, is that the 

 one? 



Right after 



Something like that, yes, that's probably it. 

 he made his famous speech. 



And that was in ^64. 



Was it in '64 that he made his speech? 



Yes. 



Nine years before the conference. 



The committee did a lot of negotiating and developed a 

 lot of principles for the proper uses of the ocean part of 

 the surface of the earth. 



They finally called a conference, the Third UN 

 Conference on the Law of the Sea, which had its first 

 meeting in Caracas in 1973. Many things had already been 

 decided pretty much in this UN committee. The chairman of 

 that committee was a Ceylonese with a long, complicated 

 name. He was then the president of the UNCLOS, until he 

 died. Very much of a diplomat, a very suave, irtpossibly 

 dull speaker, but diplomats are dull speakers deliberately. 



Not to offend anyone? 



Partly. And partly not to say anything. [laughing] Never 

 show your hand if you can avoid it. So he was very good at 

 being president of the conference. 



The conference always operated by consensus, as they 

 called it, never took a vote. The reason they didn't take a 

 vote was that that would have allowed some voting blocks to 

 do logrolling, and particularly the group of countries 

 called Landlocked and Geographically Disadvantaged States, 

 the LLGDS. 



These states were effectively frozen out of all the 

 deliberations of the conference. If they had had a vote, if 

 the conference had operated by votes, they could have 

 logrolled and traded something that they wanted for 

 something that one of the other side wanted. But with the 

 consensus business, you couldn't do it. And they didn't. 

 So they just got thoroughly screwed throughout the whole 

 meeting! 



They organized the conference in three committees: the 

 committee on the territorial sea and the exclusive economic 

 zone, the committee on the deep-sea bed, and the committee 

 on marine scientific research and the environment. Sort of 

 what was left over was in this third committee. 



Each of these committees had a chairman, and the 



