The ocean's wealth is not inexhaustible.

• Author: Jesus, Jose Luis
• Position: Reversing the Loss of Environmental Resources

I still remember the day, twenty years ago, when delegations from every comer of the world lined up in one of the conference rooms at UN Headquarters in New York for the momentous occasion of the adoption in 1982 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It was a major diplomatic event that had been awaited with a mixture of anxiety and hope by all participants, having in mind the enormous interests at stake and the difficulties faced through the years in the long, complex and at times frustrating negotiations that led to its completion. For those of us who attended the 1973 Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, this was a very special day indeed, one that would be with us for the rest of our professional lives.

Fruit of many years of negotiations involving the participation of the whole community of nations and other interested partners (over 180 delegates), the 1982 Convention managed to canvas a most comprehensive legal regime for the oceans and seas, "dealing with all the law of the sea matters". This regime was the culmination of a great deal of efforts exerted over decades by many nations in their attempt to codify and develop the law of the sea--efforts that started with the 1930 Hague Codification Conference and were carried through three UN Conferences on the law of the sea.

Bearing in mind the extensive new law development it embodies, in addition to the codification of existing rules and principles it absorbed, the Convention is an example of swift international development never before experienced. This is more so if account is taken of the fact that until half a century ago the vast ocean space, occupying almost three fourths of our planet, was practically a no-man's land, whose space and resources were under the realms of the freedom of the seas principle.

The economic and geopolitical interests of States had not boiled to the point of prompting them to extend their boundaries to the vast ocean space and its resources, exception being made of the fifteenth-century treaty arrangement on the partition of the oceans between Spain and Portugal, the maritime Powers of the day, soon overtaken by the Grotian era of freedom of the seas.

Indeed, the oceans back then had no boundaries and were, in the words of Grotius, "free and open to all", except the territorial sea--a narrow strip claimed by coastal States and generally confined to a width of three nautical miles from the shoreline. As a...