Description
Lecture presented by Frédéric Schneider, Associate Professor of Public Law.
The law of the sea, set forth primarily in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in Montego Bay in 1982, contains surprisingly few provisions specific to cetaceans and, more broadly, to marine mammals. Article 65 provides that States shall cooperate to ensure the protection of marine mammals and shall, in particular, through the appropriate international organizations, endeavor to protect, manage, and study cetaceans. The only other explicit mention of cetaceans in the Convention is found in Annex I, which concerns the fishing of highly migratory species… In reality, the law of the sea is not limited to the Montego Bay Convention, which remains a framework convention, supplemented by international case law as well as sector-specific legal instruments, such as the Action Plan for the Conservation of Cetaceans in the Mediterranean by the Contracting Parties to the Barcelona Convention (1991), ACCOBAMS (1996), the Pelagos Agreement (1999), or, more recently, the BBNJ Agreement on the High Seas (2023). However, even when informed by environmental law, the law of the sea does not always effectively address the threats facing cetacean species, such as underwater noise pollution.
