7 - The World Ocean in Globalization: Challenges for marine regions - international conference

Following on the adoption of the UN Law of the Sea Convention in December 1982, the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI) co-organized in 1983 a conference with the Law of the Sea Institute, held in Oslo. A decade later, in November 1994 the Law of the Sea Conv ention entered into force. To discuss early experiences in implementation of the Convention, on the occasion of the UN-declared International Year of the Ocean the FNI organized in 1998 another major international conference, Order for the Oceans at the T urn of the Century. Today, the Law of the Sea Convention has 155 parties and is widely accepted as an established legal and policy framework for the oceans. It will soon be 25 years since the Convention was adopted, an anniversary that can serve as a good occasion to assess the state of affairs that the Convention is aimed at regulating. The need for convening a major ocean affairs and law of the sea conference today emerges however from much deeper reasons. Today, nearly 400 years after Grotius Mare Libe rum (The Free Sea), we have come to recognize that nature does limit the ways and extent for the use of the seas and their resources. Limits to freedoms have increasingly become scientifically documented. Possibly more alarming scientific evidence about t he state of the oceans and marine resources has been acquired in the 25 years that have passed since the adoption of the Law of the Sea Convention, than in the preceding four centuries since the publication of Mare Liberum. Many aspects of globalization, affecting also the use of the seas, have likely had more impact on the state of the marine environment and resources in the past quarter-century than all human activities have had in the entire span of human history before. Against this backdrop, the F NI recognizes renewed need for a broad international discussion of the law of the sea, and plans to organize a conference titled: The World Ocean in Globalization: Challenges for marine regions, in Oslo, May 2008