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Question about colonization and claiming territory and stuff.
Loren Michael
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is a little vague, but I'm curious about current and historical law or agreement or tradition about nations and individuals and the like claiming un-inhabited and inhabited areas as their own.
Like, assume someone finds a heretofore undiscovered island. How does ownership enter the picture, or not? Is there a field that applies to extraterrestrial bodies?
I'm basically looking for Wikipedia articles, but I'm lacking the vocabulary to narrow my scope to what I'm actually interested in.
Like, assume someone finds a heretofore undiscovered island. How does ownership enter the picture, or not? Is there a field that applies to extraterrestrial bodies?
I'm basically looking for Wikipedia articles, but I'm lacking the vocabulary to narrow my scope to what I'm actually interested in.
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note that there is a distinction between artificial and natural changes here, and within the case of river demarcations, whether the change was abrupt (avulsion) or gradual (accretion).
Outer Space Treaty determines policy toward extraterrestrial bodies, at least in theory
Focus your searching around the term "Terra Nullius" and that should help. Then there are various treaties or rule sets that should flow from there.
However, you will quickly come across the problem of what is the nature of international law and how that discussion relates to concepts like Terra Nullius. I would suspect that the term is of little use in the mapped 21st century theoretical equality of states regime we operate under.
Here is a random link I found. Read pages 3-4 and that will give you an overview and reading list.
http://www.jwsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Geisler-vol18n1.pdf
A lot of this comes down to flag planting/troop presence.
Would be interesting to know what say the French or Spanish literature has to say.
Thanks a lot!
I haven't reviewed the United Nations Conventions on the International Law of the Sea for a while and even then really on the later stuff properly but where does it deal with claiming of unclaimed land (islands I guess here)? So far as I recall it was looking at territorial rights over open water primarily and the exploitation of such. The zones of classification heavily dependent on how one classifies the coast and/or islands sure, but I thought it presupposed some sort of prior right to the land territory used as reference points.
Yes, but in the absence of "new" territory in today's world, modern territorial disputes tend to be about uninhabited islands with oil reserves, which drives a lot of the South China Sea/spratly conflict. Other places fish drives the fighting (see e.g. the Cod Wars). While sovereign territorial waters extend only to maybe a dozen nm from land, 200km "exclusive economic zones" extend from each nation's coastline. This leads to a host of disputes when those EEZ bounce up against each other, and because EEZ come with the right to exclusively exploit an area.
http://www.nbr.org/publications/element.aspx?id=586#.UoF9-_mkpgg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva_Initiative ?