A Better Future for All

Pages149-151

Page 149

Most landlocked countries over many decades have been overwhelmed by problems resulting from their inability to secure access to seaports. The problems have undermined their development, and in many cases led to their acute poverty. To ease their sufferings-which are essentially due to the fragile, even ambiguous, international regime applied to them-States without access to the sea have sought successive legal innovations to reestablish, if not reclaim, their right of access. In response, there has been a clear general trend among the countries concerned, lato sensu, to deal with their problems almost mechanically through soft law means. In addition to the above general observations, the study allows us to draw a few general conclusions.

6. 1 Customary Law in Existence

Not all countries are signatories to all the universal instruments that address the issue of right of LLS access to and from the sea: 32 countries acceded to or ratified the Barcelona Statute, 62 ratified the Geneva Convention of 1958, 37 ratified the 1965 New York Convention, and 145 ratified UNCLOS III.564 In the meantime, a variety of soft instruments and practices to respond to the access problem have evolved in parallel, in different continents, countries, and political blocs. A positivist analysis would therefore call for questioning, and eventually even rejecting, the existence of real juridical value for the right of access. Yet there has been a proliferation of instruments in different continents, regions, or subregions that attempt to address the issue of LLS rights, whether to facilitate access or enforce access rights. In studying the process of finalizing these instruments- universal resolution, regionally focused declaration, or simple bilateral transit arrangement-it becomes clear that all countries have been supporting the same concept: that LLS have unequivocal rights of access to and from the sea. This involvement of a vast range of countries in bundles of different instruments that still all support the LLS unrestricted right to access to and from the sea is Page 150 undoubtedly evidence that the right of access has in fact already become an international customary law.565

6. 2 Relativism in Progress

Although the different innovations reviewed in this study, in the form of conventions, resolutions, and declarations, acknowledged...

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