693 
the natural resources of the seabed and subsoil of adjacent areas extends over 
the entirety of the continental terrace to the point where the outer edge of the 
submerged continent meets the oceanic crust of the abyssal ocean floor and also 
makes provision for the special case of those nations whose coasts drop abruptly 
to great depths. 
I am unclear in my own mind whether the statement reported at page 135 
of the ILC proceedings was an incorrect transcript of what you actually said, or 
whether there is some other explanation of its apparent inconsistency with the 
basic scope of the convention for which you were pressing. Whatever the answer 
is, I am satisfied that it has no juridical significance in undoing the inter-American 
conclusions at Ciudad Trujillo, but I would be most grateful to you for any 
clarification that you could give me. 
I apologize for the length of this letter, but as I am asking for your recollection 
on a matter some thirteen years in the past, I felt it only fair to give you a 
reasonably complete background. 
Sincerely yours, 
LUKE W. FINLAY. 
‘PAN AMERICAN UNION, 
Washington, D.C., March 12, 1969. 
Mr. LUKE W. FINLAY, 
Manager, Government Relations Department, 
Standard Oil Co., 
New York, N.Y. 
DEAR Mr. FINLAY: I take pleasure in referring to your letter of February 24 
concerning the doubts caused by the cited paragraph from the Summary Record 
of the International Law Commission (p. 135 of the ILC Yearbook, 1956, Vol. I). 
In the first place, I must admit that as this paragraph stands it makes me appear 
as saying that the submarine areas never have an extension greater than 25 miles. 
This is clearly a case of an error of interpretation on the part of the précis-writer 
and of my own negligence in failing to review the draft summary record and make 
the correction. 
However, this is simply an error since I could never have made a statement that 
presupposed an extremely restrictive position at the very time when I had taken 
the initiative to propose the broadest, most flexible formula yet know, i.e., the 
formula approved by the Inter-American Specialized Conference which had been 
held in the capital of the Dominican Republic scarecely two months prior to the 
ILC session. 
I ean only reiterate my statement, made when proposing the use of the expres- 
sion “submarine areas’, to the effect of requesting ‘“‘the Commission to take a 
decision on the right of States to exploit the natural resources of the sea-bed in 
adjacent waters to whatever depth was practicable” (p. 136). It seems that it was 
with this unrestrictive, flexible criteria, most favorable to the coastal state’s spe- 
cial interest in the exploitation of the resources of its adjacent submarine areas, 
that both the ILC and later the first Geneva Conference on the Law of the Sea 
approved the definition that appears in Article 1 of the Continental Shelf 
Convention of 1958. 
Sincerely yours, 
F. V. Garcia-AMADOR, 
Director, Department of Legal Affairs. 
(Whereupon, at 12:25 p.m. the committee adjourned, to reconvene 
for further hearing at 10 a.m. Wednesday, August 6, 1969.) 
