A stable legal regime for the world’s oceans that recognizes traditional navigational rights and freedoms is essential to U.S. national security. As a global power, the United States depends on ready and unrestricted access to the world’s oceans and international airspace. The mobility needed to maintain a military presence around the world and move military forces where needed requires daily exercise of these navigational rights and freedoms. Worldwide acceptance of the UN Law of the Sea Convention is the best way to ensure these rights are recognized, respected, and given the force of written law.

The Department of Defense strongly supports U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention. Previous concerns by the United States and other industrialized nations about the treaty’s deep seabed mining provisions were comprehensively and satisfactorily addressed in 1994. As a result, a majority of the world’s nations (123 as of January 1998) are now Party to the treaty, including most U.S. allies and all major maritime powers except the United States.

Despite this progress, some coastal states continue to ignore the international law of the sea by making excessive territorial and jurisdictional claims over ocean areas. The United States is energetic in protesting such claims, but must resort to citing as binding international law a treaty to which the United States in not yet a Party. The credibility and effectiveness of the United States in insisting that all nations adhere to the Law of the Sea Convention’s legal norms would be greatly enhanced if the United States were a Party.

As both a maritime and a coastal nation, with extensive strategic and economic interests in the world’s oceans, the United States stands to gain much by becoming Party to the Law of the Sea Convention at the earliest opportunity. The President transmitted the Convention to the Senate in October 1994. Senate advice and consent will ensure that the world’s foremost maritime nation preserves its leadership role and is better able to promote the rule of law for the oceans and encourage respect for traditional freedoms of the sea.