Grandstand. The ocean taken as a whole as a global ocean is obviously not a space free of legal norms. But in this area it is characterized by its partitioning into a plurality of maritime zones endowed with a particular status, from which derive a legal regime and specific standards for each of them.
Thus the global ocean is not apprehended by international law as a global natural space, in its planetary dimension. And that’s the problem facing the One Ocean Summit, which meets in Brest until February 11.
If there is a process that characterizes the evolution of contemporary international law of the sea, it is that of the compartmentalization and extension of state control: spatial control, control over resources.
A “common good of humanity”
We should add to this that within it, the most extensive maritime space that is the high seas (60% of its surface area) is the one where the freedom of human activities is affirmed to the maximum in terms of navigation, fishing , cable laying. Considered in its unity and physical integrity, this space essential to the survival of humanity does not exist as a legal entity, it has no status.
And although it is the major player in the planetary climate, a regulator of our atmosphere, an essential supplier of food resources, a considerable reservoir of non-biological resources, nothing or almost nothing, from an institutional point of view, comes to organize global governance of its environmental protection.
This observation should push us to change the paradigm, to consider the ocean in its geophysical unity and to have this orientation produce the concrete, pragmatic legal standards that our planet, because it is an oceanic planet, needs.
For several years now, French institutions with jurisdiction to deal with maritime issues, such as the Ministry of Ecology, the Secretary of State for the Sea, including recently the Chief of Staff of the National Navy, have work to promote, if nothing else, the concept of an “ocean common good of humanity”.
legal placebo
All stamped with official solemnity, such declarations are only a legal placebo, a screen of impotence in the face of a situation that continues to deteriorate. Claiming in an incantatory way that the ocean is a common good of humanity is a question of principle that is all the more astonishing in that it practically amounts to conferring this quality on the entire planet insofar as the maritime spaces constitute near the three quarters (70%) of the area. We thus arrive at a beautiful truism: the Earth, would be the common good of humanity? What audacity!
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