1268 
put the area in which it is engaged in mineral resources development beyond 
the shelf’s outer limits.” 
It is in the first place questionable whether compensation ought to disregard 
legitimate expectations of return on investment which are frustrated by the new 
regime. Certainly if the investment itself is lost, the future returns on it, which 
may well be demonstrable, are also going to be lost. Secondly, it seems to me 
rather questionable whether all states can or will follow the policy here recom- 
mended only for the United States. It is one thing to suggest that the U.S. pro- 
vide compensation which it could more or less easily afford but it is an entirely 
different matter to make the same demand of Equitorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, 
Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mauritania, Panama, Peru, Philippines,, 
Senegal, Sudan, Suriam, and Trinidad, all of which have issued leases or con- 
cessions beyond 200 meters® and none of which occupy so favorable a wealth 
position as the United States. Since this Commission recommendation could not 
practicably be implemented in many instances, and since U.S. companies would 
therefore frequently be the losers, this particular episode of U.S. leadership could 
turn out to be costly to the United States. 
Moreover if fear should exist that other states could not adopt such compensa- 
tory policies, the consequence could be to deter the future investment the Com- 
mission says it wishes to encourage. If uncertainty does act as a deterrent to 
investment, as the Commission argues in another context, it may be that the 
Commission’s own recommendations will serve just such a function. At the very 
least it is less than clear that the policies the Commission recommends for the 
U.S. can actually be employed by many other states around the world. 
Turning, finally, to the Commission’s substantive recommendations on the 
shelf limit and the regime beyond, only brief appraisal is attempted here of 
some of the less technical but still significant elements. It deserves notice, initi- 
ally, that the Commission Report offers only very sketchy discussion of these 
issues, far less than is warranted by the Commission’s own estimate of their 
importance. Surprisingly even the International Panel Report offers but skimpy 
augmentation of the Commission text. 
The bulk of the discussion in the Commission Report is devoted to criticism 
of the position advocated by the National Petroleum Council in its Interim 
Report for the Department of the Interior. A key element of this criticism is. 
the conclusion that neither the “language” nor the “history” of the continental 
shelf definition warrants the interpretation that coastal rights extend to the 
entire continental land mass, i.e., to the geological shelf, slopes, and at least the 
landward portions of the continental rise. 
It seems difficult to establish that the Shelf Convention sets out any explicit 
limit on the shelf even though there was undoubtedly an intent to indicate there 
was a limit on coastal expansion. What the Geneva Conference apparently sought 
to do was to achieve both some certainty (hence the 200—meter limit) plus suffi- 
cient flexibility to take into account unpredictable technological and economic 
progress (hence the exploitability criterion in the alternative). It was very 
clearly anticipated that soveref#gn rights could extend beyond 200 meters when 
the requisite conditions came to exist. However it is also quite clear that the 
conferees in Geneva did not believe they had disposed of the entire ocean floor, 
i.e., they were aware there was a limit but did not seek to establish what it might 
be in advance of the social-political-economic-technological context which would 
eall for and permit more precise definition. In the meantime the limit was to 
move outward as exploitation moved outward, to the limit of adjacency, until 
the Convention could be revised. 
In this context the contention that the NPC position has no warrant in either 
language or history of the Convention is only a partial truth. The Convention 
definition can reasonably be interpreted to permit expansion of the shelf limit 
to the edge of the continental land mass (and a few believe even further) as 
exploitation becomes feasible so long as the limit is still “adjacent” to the coastal 
states. Accordingly the Commission statement, when coupled with its recom- 
mendation for imminent revision of the Convention definition. either mag- 
nificiently begs the question or is self-fulfilling, for unless the definition is revised 
the shelf boundary probably wold in time reach the submerged edge of the 
continental land mass. At the same time the NPC position also it not an acceptable 
interpretation of the Convention insofar as the NPC declares that the shelf 
definition now extends coastal sovereign rights to the continental margin. The 
Convention itself obviously does not explicitly define the shelf in terms of the 
continental land mass and it could have done so if a sufficient consensus to that 
