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There has always, however, been a certain conflict between freedom of the 

 seas, as a guiding principle for activities in the ocean, and national territoriality, 

 if for no other reason than that for strategic and perhaps economic reasons, 

 coastal states have been unwilling to grant maritime powers unimpeded across 

 to the ocean directly off their shores. A narrow strip of the ocean surrounding 

 the coast has thus long been regarded as legally the territory of the coastal 

 state — that is to say, subject to the principle of national territoriality in the same 

 way as the land area, for all purposes except certain reserved rights of naviga- 

 tion to and from the coastal state's ports. 



You are doubtless familiar with the further tension between these two funda- 

 mental organizing principles as regards ocean space, which has developed since 

 World War II. The first and most dramatic attack on the dominance of the 

 notion of the freedom of the seas beyond territorial waters came, somewhat 

 paradoxically, from a groat maritime nation, in the form of the Truman Proc- 

 lamation proclaiming United States sovereign rights over the resources of the 

 continental shelf. The Truman Proclamation was stimulated primarily by the 

 justified expectation that the continental shelf contained commercially exploita- 

 ble petroleum resources. It was followed in 1952 by a move by certain West Coast 

 Latin American Countries — Chile, Ecuador, and Peru — claiming to extend to a 

 distance of 200 miles a national jurisdiction closely approximating complete ter- 

 ritorial authority. Other states made claims of territorial waters beyond the 

 three-miles traditionally rec-ognized by the United States and other major mari- 

 time powers, and there were similar extensions of jurisdiction for limited pur- 

 po.ses, in particular for fishing. 



In 1958 and 1960, two conferences on the law of the sea convened by the United 

 Nations undertook to codify and refine the existing law of the sea. As to the 

 continental shelf, a convention was drawn up essentially ratifying the position 

 taken unilaterally by the United States in the Truman Proclamatio. conferring 

 sovereign rights on the coastal state over resources of the Continental Shelf up 

 to a liimt of 200 meters, and beyond that to whatever depth permitted of exploi- 

 tation of those resources. The traditional freedoms of the high seas were re- 

 afBrmed and partially listed in a convention on the high seas, which asserted, 

 both for coastal and noncoastal states, freedom of navigation, freedom of fishing, 

 freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines, and freedom to fly over the high 

 seas. The conference came very close to agreement on a maximum permissible 

 territorial sea of six miles, but failed, largely as a result of the insistence of 

 the United States on three miles. 



Thereafter, during the 1960s, the conflict between national territoriality and 

 freedom of the seas intensified with a gradually increasing number of unilateral 

 extensions of national jurisdictions. The conflict was fueled, in the late sixties, 

 by the development of new technologies, which seemed to promise commercially 

 significant mineral development from the deep ocean floor — a possibility hardly 

 thought of as recently as the conferences of 1958 and 1960. Similar technological 

 development, in other areas, particularly large-scale and highly mechanized 

 systems of harvesting of fish, and known or suspected military applications of 

 technology for weapons or intelligence purposes, produced a similar effect. All 

 of these burgeoning technologies tended to convince the technology-poor ma- 

 jority of the coastal countries of the world that perhaps legal and political 

 moves were required to prevent preemptive exploitation of "their" i)arts of the 

 ocean by the technologically rich. At the same time, developed countries were 

 stimulated to look on the ocean from the perspective of a richer complex of 

 interests than had been the case when navigation, fishing, and strategic security 

 were their only major ocean concerns. 



In the late 1960s, the Ignited States 'and the Soviet Union began extensive 

 diplomatic efforts aimed at a new conference on the territorial sea. The underly- 

 ing premise of this effort was that there should be a treaty agreeing on a 

 twelve-mi'e territorial sea, accompanied by guaranties of free passage through 

 those international straits which would be enclo.sed by such an extension of the 

 territorial sea from three to twelve miles, and by preferential rights for coastal 

 fishing states in return for the willingness of these states to forego more extensive 

 claims of territorial seas. 



Almost simultaneously, an initiative was taken in the United Nations by 

 Amba.ssador Pardo of Malta, largely stimulated by the perceived need to devise 

 international means of regulating the mineral resources of the deep sea-bed in 

 the interest of all mankind. The two initiatives merged, and the ensuing discus- 

 sions eventually produced a decision in the United Nation's General A.ssembly to 

 hold a comprehensive conference on the law of the sea, at which much, if not 



