[NYTr] The new British empire? UK plans to annex south Atlantic

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy (activ-l)

The Guardian - Sep 22, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2174615,00.html

The new British empire? UK plans to annex south Atlantic

By Owen Bowcott

Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square
miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension
Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas,
mineral and oil fields, the Guardian has learned.

The UK claims, to be lodged at the UN Commission on the Limits of the
Continental Shelf, exploit a novel legal approach that is transforming
the international politics of underwater prospecting.

Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the
UN - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with
Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests.

Relying on detailed geological and geophysical surveys by scientists and
hydrographers, any state can delineate a new "continental shelf outer
limit" that can extend up to 350 miles from its shoreline. Data has
been collected for most of Britain's submissions and Chris Carleton,
head of the law of the sea division at the UK Hydrographic Office and
an international expert on the process, said preliminary talks on
Rockall are being held in Reykjavik, Iceland, next week.

Mr Carleton believes the Falklands claim has the most potential for
acrimonious political fallout. Britain and Argentina fought over the
islands 25 years ago, and the value of the oil under the sea in the
region is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could
be up to 60m barrels under the ocean floor.

Britain has been granted licences for exploratory drilling around the
islands within the normal 200-mile exploration limit and any new claim
to UNCLCS would extend territorial rights further into the Atlantic.

"It would be beyond the 200-mile limit but less than 350 miles," said Mr
Carleton, who is involved in preparing the submission. "It effectively
joins up the area around South Georgia to the Falklands. It's a claim
but how it's handled has not been decided yet. The Argentinians will
say it's not ours to claim. It's all a bit tricky."

Martin Pratt, director of research at Durham University's international
boundaries research unit, added: "The Russians may be claiming the
Arctic but the UK is claiming a large chunk of the Atlantic. Some
states might ask why a big power is entitled to huge stretches of the
ocean's resources thousands of miles away from its land, but that's the
way the law is."

Because of the sensitivities - earlier this year Buenos Aires scrapped a
1995 agreement with the UK to share any oil found in the adjacent
waters - the first formal application from the UK is likely to centre
on Ascension.

The volcanic island, 1,000 miles from the African mainland, sits just
to one side of the mid-Atlantic ridge. No gas or oil is likely to be
found below the surrounding waters but there could be significant
mineral deposits on the ocean floor.

Talks have already begun between Ireland, Iceland and Denmark for the
division of rights far out into the north Atlantic. It includes the
island of Rockall and the sub-sea Hatton ridge. The competing claims
are nowhere near final resolution although Ireland and the UK have
agreed a common boundary.

Other countries that have submitted claims to the ocean floors around
remote overseas dependencies have run into fierce resentment from
neighbouring nations. France, which this summer registered its claim to
thousands of square miles around New Caledonia, in the Pacific, has
received protests from Vanuatu warning that the claim has "serious
implications and ramifications on Vanuatu's legal and traditional
sovereignty". Russia was criticised this summer for making claims
beneath the Arctic Ocean.

The UN body has been progressing slowly through its casework. The
process of extending the normal 200-mile limit requires volumes of
technical evidence of submarine soundings. According to the convention
on the law of the sea, applicant states may register their rights by
"establishing the foot of the continental slope, by meeting the
requirements stated for the thickness of sedimentary rocks".

Once demarcated, the ocean floor may then be claimed up to 60 nautical
miles from the bottom of the continental slope. When territorial rights
have been obtained, states have the right to extract any minerals,
natural gas or oil discovered in the annexed seabed.

There is a deadline of May 2009 for claims from the UK and other
countries to be submitted, although states that ratified the treaty
later have more time. "The amount of technical data required is
massive," said Mr Pratt. "Australia recently submitted 80 volumes."

In the past, Greenpeace has described the process as a "land grab".