News Release

October 13, 2005

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Pirates of the High Seas: Robbing with the Law of the Sea Treaty
Study urges Senate to reject the treaty as not in the American interest

WASHINGTON - A new study by the Cato Institute argues forcefully against the US Senate ratifying an international measure that would allow the United Nations (UN) to subject navigation and seabed to questionable international control.

According to the study, the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which the UN has been urging the US to pass since the 1980s, would discourage resource and mineral development and wouldn't help the US and allies to intercept shipments of weapons of mass destruction.

Supporters claim that the treaty is necessary to ensure the rule of law on the high seas and would help to fight the war on global terrorism. However, in "Don't Resurrect the Law of the Sea Treaty," Doug Bandow, a Cato senior fellow, disputes such arguments.

He says: "Adherence to LOST might constrain Washington's ability to intercept weapons shipments that are problematic, but legal, under existing international law. After all, any proliferation policy treats nations differently based upon a subjective assessment of the stability and intention of a particular government. LOST makes no such distinctions."

On the development front, Bandow contends that the benefits of signing LOST are so insignificant that they are "offset by its convoluted approach to property rights." He maintains that since free markets have greatly improved the world's poorest countries, adopting LOST would to be a return to a collectivist and redistributionist tradition and would essentially eliminate ocean property rights.

Treating the seabed as the "common heritage of mankind" would discourage resource development by private investors and would result in burdensome regulations and additional bureaucracy for developers.

Funding for the International Seabed Authority, a subsidiary agency of the UN, is also a big problem, says Bandow. "The United States, naturally, would be expected to provide the largest share of the ISA's budget, 25 percent to start. ...The ISA's budget is modest, but the revised agreement changed none of the underlying institutional incentives that bias virtually every international organization, most obviously the UN itself, towards extravagance."

Policy Analysis no. 552