UN High Seas Treaty
Context:
- A common UN treaty involving 168 countries for protecting the oceans has failed recently.
- In June, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had declared an “ocean emergency” at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, citing threats to the world’s oceans.
About UN High Seas Treaty
- The UN High Seas Treaty also known as Paris Agreement for the Ocean, is the treaty to deal with Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction has been under discussion for several years.
- The ocean outside the Exclusive Economic Zones, which extend from a country’s shore to a distance of around 200 nautical miles or 370 km into the sea and where it has exclusive rights for exploration, is the subject of the proposed treaty.
- Beyond that, the water is referred to as the open or high seas.
- The United Nations Convention on Laws of the Sea (UNCLOS), which established the rights of nations in relation to marine resources, was the framework under which the treaty was to be drafted.
- A UN resolution from 2017 resolved to fix this while setting 2022 as the deadline because there is currently no convention for maintaining the health of large portions of the earth’s oceans.
Source The Hindu
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