The IMLI Treatise On Global Ocean Governance Volume I: UN and Global Ocean Governance

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) remains the cornerstone of global ocean governance. However, it lacks effective provisions or mechanisms to ensure that all ocean space and related problems are dealt with holistically. With seemingly no opportunity for revision due to the Conventions burdensome amendment provisions, complementary mechanisms dealing with such aspects of global ocean governance including maritime transport, fisheries, and marine environmental sustainability, have been developed under the aegis of the United Nations and other relevant international organizations. This approach is inherently fragmented and unable to achieve sustainable global ocean governance. In light of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goal 14, the IMLI Treatise proposes a new paradigm on the basis of integrated and cross-sectoral approach in order to realise a more effective and sustainable governance regime for the oceans. This volume focuses on the role of UN as the central intergovernmental organization responsible for global ocean governance. It examines the ocean governance challenges and how the present legal, policy, and institutional frameworks of the UN have addressed these challenges. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of UN legal structures and offers tangible proposals to realize the ambition of a global ocean governance system.

David Joseph Attard, the General Academic Coordinator and Editor of this series, is the Director of the International Maritime Law Institute. He has been a judge at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea since 2011, and Vice-President of the Tribunal since 2017. He read law at the University of Malta and the University of Oxford, was appointed to the Chair of Public International Law at the University of Malta, and has been a Visiting Professor of International Law at the University of Rome II, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, as well as a Fullbright Fellow at the Yale Law School. David M. Ong, the Academic Coordinator for this volume, is a Research Professor of International and Environmental Law at the Nottingham Law School, at Nottingham Trent University, and a Visiting Fellow at the International Maritime Law Institute of the International Maritime Organization. He was part of a UK research council funded project on the legal implications of project-financed infrastructure projects for human rights and environmental protection, and has served as a consultant on offshore joint development issues to the Guyana legal team in the Guyana-Suriname maritime boundary delimitation arbitration, as well as a technical resource expert on Joint Development at the Second United Nations Development Programme South-South High Level Meeting on Oil and Gas Producing Developing Countries held in Nairobi. Dino Kritsiotis, the editor of this volume, is Chair of Public International Law at the University of Nottingham, and serves as the founding Head of the International Humanitarian Law Unit of the Human Rights Law Centre. He has held the Robert K. Castetter Distinguished Visiting Foreign Law Professorship at the California Western School of Law in San Diego as well as the L. Bates Lea Visiting Professorship of Law at the University of Michigan. He has lectured and taught at the University of Hong Kong, the University of New South Wales, the