1 Dipping into the Oceans – A Letter to Santa Barbara

In the first week of October 1967, a handwritten letter appeared in the in-tray at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The letter was formally addressed to ‘Dr Hutchins’, and was from a Mr Aubrey H Whitelaw of North Stonington, Connecticut.¹ Rather than Hutchins, it was Elisabeth Mann Borgese who replied to the letter. Perhaps the letter arrived on Hutchins’s desk at a busy time; he may have had a quick look at it and passed it on to her. We will never know the full story, but the follow-up letter from Whitelaw was addressed directly to Elisabeth Mann Borgese, thanking her for her reply in October.²

This correspondence is significant because there has been some uncertainty about where, when and how Elisabeth Mann Borgese was introduced to the discussions about ocean governance that had been going on at the United Nations since the International Law Commission (ilc) had identified questions around the Law of the Sea as ‘key issues’³ in 1947.⁴ Did the first two Conventions on the Law of the Sea – unclos i in 1958 and unclos ii in 1960 – pass unnoticed by Mann Borgese and her colleagues in Chicago and Santa Barbara? And what was it about the preparations for unclos iii that made it so appealing for an ‘internationalist’ who had worked on world governance and the Pacem in Terris conferences to engage with the discussions in the late 60s?

The correspondence with Whitelaw might give us a hint. In the letter that appeared on Mann Borgese’s desk in early October 1967, Whitelaw wrote that he had ‘recently become intrigued by the proposal that the U.N. might gain financial independence of its sovereign national members’.⁵ He added that he believed ‘the U.N. must very soon play a much more effective peace-keeping role in world affairs than the major national sovereign members are likely to permit or encourage’.⁶ Whitelaw reported that he had been looking into the field of ‘oceanography’, and had started to become aware of ‘the many promising aspects of exploiting the ocean depths (70% of the Earth’s surface which belong to no nation) […]’.⁷ He could not help ‘relating the significance of these new sources of wealth to a possible solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as: famine conditions, industrial resources for undersupplied and underdeveloped nations […]’.⁸

Whitelaw’s proposal was mostly about financing the United Nations with revenues from seabed exploitation, and possibly extending this source of funding to other ‘pressing problems’ that the international community would face during the twentieth century and in the more distant future. What must have made his suggestions particularly interesting for Mann Borgese was that he believed problem-solving needed to be internationalised, and that nation states were less suited to the challenges that lay ahead. This must have resonated with Mann Borgese’s own ideas of world governance. In his letter, Whitelaw pointed out that potential sources of wealth existed in the oceans, and that these had not been appropriated by any nation state – meaning they could be used to solve world problems. He had made a connection between what Elisabeth Mann Borgese’s work at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions stood for – experimenting with internationalism and world governance – and possible future developments in the form of peace-keeping through international organisations and using marine resources to achieve economic equity.⁹ The only missing link, assuming that the centre was not yet aware of it, was his remark about the ‘promising aspects of exploiting the ocean depths’.¹⁰

The discussions that preceded unclos iii were fuelled by the widely recognised fact that marine minerals and other resources existed and could soon be utilised. Even back in 1945, President Truman had already understood that the continental shelf might harbour resources worth claiming, and it was with this in mind that the state secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, had called the US continental shelf a ‘storehouse of resources’.¹¹ What had changed between 1945 and 1967 was the state of technological development, and the possibilities that came with this. In 1945, the resources on and underneath the seafloor had been largely out of reach, hence Ickes’s storehouse metaphor. In 1967, on the other hand, there was an optimistic view that technological development would make these resources accessible in the near future.¹² This meant that in the minds of many of those working on ocean governance questions, the seafloor had shifted from being a ‘storehouse’ to an actual deposit.

In 1999, Mann Borgese said of Whitelaw (who she called an ‘unknown gentleman from Connecticut’)¹³ that his letter had drawn her attention to ‘the growing importance of the issues involved in the Law of the Sea, including various proposals to declare the oceans to be Common Heritage of Mankind’.¹⁴ Whitelaw’s suggestions reminded her of the proposal in the old draft world constitution to apply the concept of common property to the world, and she immediately set about convincing Hutchins to sanction a three-year project examining the Law of the Sea. For Mann Borgese, ‘the prospect of seeing at least one of the “four elements of life” declared to be the common heritage of mankind was indeed exciting […]’,¹⁵ and she believed that the project would be a ‘worthwhile undertaking, enabling us to bring the utopian ideals of the World Constitutions into the arena of real politics’.¹⁶ Having convinced Hutchins, Mann Borgese started to work on a project proposal with international law expert, Wolfgang Friedmann.¹⁷ Shortly after this, a speech at the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly addressed exactly the same issue, and ‘struck like lightning’.¹⁸

2 A Person of Rare Vision?

On 1 November 1967, a tall, middle-aged man with a vanishing hairline and a slight belly took his place behind the speaker’s desk at the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly. He might have placed a bundle of papers carefully upon the speaker’s desk or adjusted his thick black glasses before taking a deep breath and starting to speak.¹⁹ It was an ordinary Wednesday in November, and there were surprisingly few people there to witness what was about to happen.²⁰ The man who had ascended to the speaker’s desk proceeded to deliver a two-hour speech that those present would continue to talk about for decades. It was a ‘you should have been there’ kind of moment.²¹

That man was Arvid Pardo. In 1964, he had been appointed Malta’s first ambassador to the United Nations.²² The tiny archipelagic state had recently gained independence from Great Britain, and was eager to make a splash in the only arena available to small states: the United Nations. The speech was about humanity’s ventures into the deep oceans and the possibilities that lay ahead.²³ Arvid Pardo compared the air on Earth to the water in the sea. The air, he said, was the ‘atmosphere of land’,²⁴ while water was the ‘atmosphere of submerged land’.²⁵ He made a connection between the space inhabited by humanity – namely the Earth and the airspace above it – and the underwater space that humanity was about to infiltrate.

Pardo went on to talk about the origins of humanity’s interest in the deep sea, which had been inaccessible for most of history. The first attempts to utilise the seafloor, he said, had been the efforts to lay the first transatlantic cable.²⁶ He continued by outlining various existing possibilities for extracting resources from the oceans, such as the attempts to get gold and silver out of seawater – which he claimed the German government had already tried in the interwar period but had found too expensive.²⁷ Pardo also mentioned humanity’s long-standing interest in the hunt for ‘sunken treasures’²⁸ and ‘archaeological treasures’.²⁹ He went on to cover the penetration of the seafloor through ‘sub-bottom mining’³⁰ and noted the extraction of oil³¹ and gas.³² All these he used as examples of resources that humans knew about and had tried to exploit.

Having established the current state of humanity’s knowledge and capabilities, Pardo moved on to what he thought lay ahead: the extraction of polymetallic nodules from the seafloor.³³ He described the nodules as ‘irregularly spherical in shape, like potatoes, ranging from 0.5 to 25 cm in diameter’.³⁴ Pardo asserted that there was an ‘abundance’³⁵ of these resources, and that in some places they were found in a ‘concentration of 50 kg per square metre’.³⁶ According to Pardo, these figures were taken from John Mero’s book, The Mineral Resources of the Sea,³⁷ in which Mero had attempted to estimate the deposits of nodules on the seafloor.

That the seabed held potential as a new source of raw materials was not breaking news. To understand Pardo’s enthusiasm for these potato-shaped stones on the seafloor, we need to go back to their initial discovery. The first attempt to research marine manganese nodules was the hms Challenger expedition from 1872–6.³⁸ GP Glasby, a geologist from New Zealand, mentioned this expedition in the historical preface of a book he edited in the 1970s that was concerned with marine manganese deposits in the world’s oceans.³⁹ ‘The results of this cruise’, Glasby stated, ‘were unique in as much as they were to dominate thinking on manganese nodules for over 80 years’.⁴⁰ This takes us up to the 1950s when new studies were conducted – most likely prompted by increasing demand for new sources of raw materials after a period of instability and international conflict. It was this same climate that would dominate international relations and policy-making during unclos.

According to Glasby, there were ‘sporadic’ follow-ups to the Challenger expedition’s research. Expeditions were conducted by the Albatross from 1899–1900 and 1904–5 in the North Pacific, while other research trips included the Carnegie expedition in 1928–9 and the John Murray expedition in 1933–4 where nodules were collected. Apart from these, little was done to investigate deep sea nodules until after World War ii.⁴¹ A Swedish expedition in 1947–8 carried out pioneering research assembling an extensive collection of ‘deep sea sediment cores’,⁴² but it was only in 1965 that John Mero first managed to collect ‘data on the regional variation of nodule composition throughout the Pacific […]’.⁴³ In terms of the economic value of deep sea nodules, Mero had already published a relevant study in 1958.⁴⁴ It was the same year unclos i took place in Geneva, but at that time deep sea minerals were not specifically on the agenda. It took Arvid Pardo’s 1967 speech to officially bring them into the negotiations on ocean governance.

Despite the existence of other resources, polymetallic nodules would become the resource that was most discussed in connection with unclos iii in the following years. It is difficult to work out exactly why the nodules remained so persistently on the agenda for the delegates at the United Nations. One explanation could be that Mero’s study meant there was a very optimistic (and incorrect)⁴⁵ estimate of their commercial value. Another could be that they were the resources that had been explored and studied most extensively since the first Challenger expedition way back in 1872–6.⁴⁶

Polymetallic nodules, however, were not the only minerals known to scientists in 1967, and Arvid Pardo’s speech ranged much more widely. He was clearly interested in a variety of marine resources such as ‘phosphorite nodules’,⁴⁷ ‘calcareous ooze’⁴⁸ in sediments and ‘pelagic clays’.⁴⁹ And having listed the potential mineral resources available, Pardo went even further, extending his scope to what today we would call ‘genetic resources’⁵⁰ – a general term for all potential resources in the oceans that could be farmed or otherwise utilised for food supply or biotechnological purposes.⁵¹ He even suggested that dolphins might be used as sheepdogs⁵² in futuristic fish farms.⁵³

Pardo made predictions about when each method of using these marine resources might be possible, based on the existing state of technological development. He drew a distinction between farming – as a way to utilise the genetic resources – and the exploitation of mineral resources. The latter, according to Pardo, was ‘imminent’,⁵⁴ while farming and other forms of utilisation were ‘in the future’.⁵⁵ Although Arvid Pardo recognised that the vehicles used to extract nodules could have high operating costs, he was enthusiastic about the imminent exploitation of marine minerals, due to the development of technology that would make this exploitation less costly.⁵⁶ Pardo’s speech reveals that he was well-informed about the technology that was already on the market or in development. He seemed positive that effective mining equipment was right around the corner. For instance, he reported that ‘A prototype submersible for commercial mining of the rich manganese-nodule deposits […] is under construction now, and others are planned’.⁵⁷ As for the extraction technology, he informed his listeners that: ‘The nodules will be raked from the ocean floor and pumped into the vessel […]’,⁵⁸ and that from there they would be ‘transferred easily to an accompanying cargo-ship by means of a floating conduit’.⁵⁹

This must have been exciting news for the delegates listening to the speech. Pardo made it seem like the exploitation of marine minerals was within reach, and so it was only reasonable that he should also warn of an imminent and unfair race to the seafloor.⁶⁰ Pardo noted the lack of a worldwide overarching ‘institutional framework’⁶¹ that could grapple with ocean issues and prevent this from happening. He argued that many United Nations agencies were involved with the oceans in one way or another,⁶² and that this made dealing with the ocean on an international basis a difficult and compromised affair. Another of Pardo’s worries was that the seafloor could be used for warfare. He warned that sovereign states might start installing weaponry stations on the seafloor as soon as the technology to do so was in place.⁶³ To prevent this, he suggested making the seafloor outside national jurisdiction into a zone in which warfare was off-limits. He also warned of the hazards of dumping atomic waste, and in general of what he called ‘the wider problem of marine pollution’.⁶⁴ In engaging with the question of pollution, Pardo was picking up a thread that had been touched on briefly by only one of the four conventions that had been negotiated during unclos i and ii – the Convention on the High Seas. Articles 24 and 25 are concerned with the pollution of the high seas through dumping of atomic waste or – and this is interesting – pollution through exploration for exploitation of the seabed.⁶⁵

By this point, Arvid Pardo had spoken for such a long time that he had to break off and resume his talk in the afternoon session.⁶⁶ Back at the speaker’s desk, he made some final remarks in summary. He called for an ‘effective international régime’,⁶⁷ which would be accepted by ‘rich and poor countries, strong and weak, coastal and landlocked states’.⁶⁸ Thus far, Pardo had mainly talked about the various possibilities that existing and future technologies brought to the deep seas. He had cautioned of the hazards that were intrinsic to humanity’s ventures into this area, and now he had a suggestion to manage both the possibilities and the dangers. To this end, Arvid Pardo suggested applying the concept of common heritage of mankind to the ocean floor outside national jurisdiction, stating that ‘the seabed and the ocean floor are a common heritage of mankind and should be used and exploited for peaceful purposes and for the exclusive benefit of mankind as a whole’.⁶⁹

To achieve a sense of order in the oceans that would avoid such a chaotic race, he asked the international community to establish a kind of ‘trustee’⁷¹ of the ocean floor. An agency that would have everyone’s approval. Pardo was very clear that this could not be achieved by giving all countries the same voting power,⁷² and to some extent this was quite prophetic, since the question of how to reach agreement during unclos iii would be the first of many stumbling blocks. In order to establish such a ‘trustee’ or ‘agency’ for a new Law of the Sea, Pardo suggested putting together a collection of representatives who would start working on the question of ocean governance.⁷³

Pardo’s speech shows clearly what was the driving force behind the urge to renegotiate ocean governance after unclos i and unclos ii had failed to close the deal. Together with the exact definition of maritime boundaries, two other issues had surfaced: the exploitation of natural resources and the potential to place weaponry stations on the seafloor outside national jurisdiction. Pardo had tried to address both these issues. He suggested an overarching agency for the ocean floor that could govern the resources in a way that would ensure access and benefit to all mankind. And he wanted to reserve this same space for peaceful purposes only, thereby preventing anyone from installing weaponry on the seafloor.

The need to renegotiate ocean governance had been foreshadowed both by the Truman proclamation and its ensuing chain reaction of ocean territory claims, and also by the first two unclos conferences, in which the possibilities and shape of maritime boundaries had been discussed for the first time. Arvid Pardo compounded these developments with another one – the exploration of marine mineral resources – and united them all under a new concept: the common heritage of mankind. Arvid Pardo’s speech has been celebrated as a starting point – as the initial idea that would spark decades of diplomatic uproar at the United Nations and revolutionise the Law of the Sea. The story usually goes on to celebrate Arvid Pardo as the ‘father of the Law of the Sea’.⁷⁴ But who was the Maltese ambassador? Where did he come from? How did he end up behind the speaker’s desk? And why did his speech have such dramatic consequences?

3 Arvid Pardo – From Political Prisoner to Diplomat

Arvid Pardo did not appear out of nowhere to take the podium at the United Nations – and nor did his suggestions for ocean governance. Both the man and his ideas had a back story. Pardo was born in Rome on 12 February 1914, the child of an international marriage. His father, Guido Pardo, was born in Valetta in 1874, while his mother, Dagmar Julin, was a Swede born in Gothenburg in 1878. Pardo was half Swedish and half Maltese, but was born in Italy and attended kindergarten in London and Geneva. He became an orphan in 1922 at just eight years old. His father died from typhus caught on a mission for the International Labour Organization in Russia and his mother followed shortly afterwards from complications caused by surgery for appendicitis. His brother had died the year before in a motorcycle accident.⁷⁵ Bernardo Attolicio – who was an Italian ambassador to Brazil, the Soviet Union and Germany – became Arvid Pardo’s guardian until he was twenty-one years old.⁷⁶

Pardo’s bad luck would continue until the end of World War ii. Although he managed to gain a doctoral degree in international law at the University of Rome in 1933 and a degree in diplomatic history at the University of Tours in 1938–9,⁷⁷ he was arrested in Rome in 1940 for underground activities.⁷⁸ The exact nature of his offences remains uncertain, other than that he was ‘organizing groups to aid the Allies’.⁷⁹ He was sentenced to eighteen years in prison by an Italian court, and was detained in Regina Coeli prison in Rome.⁸⁰ From a letter Pardo wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Malta in 1968, many years later, we learn that his sentence was annulled after World War ii.⁸¹

In the same letter, he reported further that he had been deported to Germany in 1943, together with Ruggero Zangrandi, an Italian journalist and author. Pardo claimed that Zangrandi mentioned him under a pseudonym in his book, A Train to the Brenner,⁸² an account of their deportation and hazardous journey through German prison camps and back to Rome. If we believe Pardo that he is portrayed in the book, we can only guess at which character he is. Most likely, he is one of the two Italian ‘intellectuals’,⁸³ Aldo and Paolo, who are deported together in a bus and taken to the Alexanderplatz prison in Berlin. Since Paolo is the main character in the book – and must therefore be Zangrandi himself – it is likely that the other Italian on the bus, ‘a lawyer named Aldo’,⁸⁴ represents Arvid Pardo.

Zangrandi reports the death of cell-mates, hunger and envy among the prisoners, and the shell-shocking experience of the bombing of Berlin as witnessed by the inmates. He paints a picture of an existence endured under life-threatening conditions, of endless harassment by the guards – especially towards Italians – and of the hard labour the prisoners had to carry out in order to be fed.

This corresponds with many of the other reports about conditions in German prisons, and we can assume that Zangrandi’s experiences were the same as those of his fellow inmates – including Arvid Pardo. When he was sentenced and imprisoned in Italy, Pardo was just twenty-six years old. He would spend five years of his life in prison before he was freed by the Red Cross in 1945 and was able to make for the border in southern Germany – on foot, according to some sources.⁸⁶ During that time, he was moved from the prison in Rome to the forced labour camp at Grossbeeren, then to Alexanderplatz prison, and was briefly arrested by the Russians before he could make his journey home.⁸⁷

Arvid Pardo’s ingrained interest in peacekeeping and justice could be partly explained through his personal history, especially the war years spent in prison. Soon after returning to Rome, he took up a modest administrative position at the United Nations as the chief of the archives⁸⁸ (1946–7)⁸⁹ and started to climb the ranks. He served as social affairs officer (1947–60), represented the UN Development Program in Nigeria and Ecuador (1961–3 and 1963–4) and became Malta’s permanent representative to the UN in 1964,⁹⁰ while also being the Maltese ambassador to the United States and the Soviet Union (1966 and 1968–71).⁹¹ It was in his capacity as Malta’s ambassador to the United Nations that Pardo gave his speech about the world’s oceans. It would earn him the title of ‘father of the Law of the Sea’.

4 The Maltese Initiative – Did Pardo Really Do It Single-Handedly?

Naturally, Arvid Pardo’s November 1967 speech at the United Nations did not occur out of the blue and without prior discussion. Back in August, the Maltese had already asked to put the seabed on the agenda, and had thereby announced the Maltese initiative.⁹² It was no secret – either to the United Nations officials or to Mann Borgese and her colleagues at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions – that something was about to happen in the United Nations concerning the Law of the Sea and the seafloor. Some UN member states were already critical towards Malta’s initiative even before Arvid Pardo took the podium, to the extent that the Maltese government felt that their ambassador had to begin his speech by responding to scepticism from the United States. Pardo started out by making it clear that ‘I can categorically state that we are not a sounding-board for any State, and nobody, “put the Maltese Government up to it”’.⁹³

Apparently there were suspicions that the Maltese were acting as a puppet for Great Britain’s maritime interests. This suspicion was not too far-fetched, since Malta had gained independence in 1964, only two years earlier. In that same year, when Arvid Pardo was first made Maltese representative to the United Nations, he had said in an interview for the New York Times that his government ‘still had ties to Britain’.⁹⁴ However, in 1967 the Maltese were adamant that Arvid Pardo’s speech was entirely their own initiative, and that it was simply an attempt to put the tiny archipelagic state on the map.⁹⁵ Considering that Malta was the smallest member of the United Nations by area, making the proposal was certainly a bold step.⁹⁶

Arvid Pardo’s appearance in the General Assembly is often referred to as a pivotal moment in the history of the Law of the Sea. Sometimes the appreciation of its significance goes so far as to suggest that Pardo did this ‘single-handedly’.⁹⁷ However, more recent studies have started to question the notion that Malta and Arvid Pardo were the first to introduce the common heritage concept to the international community. Surabhi Ranganathan attempts to put Pardo’s speech into context, stating that it is ‘often (if wrongly) recalled as the world’s first introduction to the concept of chm, entailing the international administration of the deep seabed’.⁹⁸

Clearly, different terms were in circulation to describe ownership or entitlement relating to the resources in the uncharted territory of the ocean floor. Johnson chose to label this right ‘the legacy of all human beings’, while Pardo opted to talk about ‘the common heritage of mankind’. He had considered using the term ‘common property’ as the Chicago committee had done, but he rejected the thought quickly, since ‘property’ might imply a particular sense of entitlement that could lead to a race to grab the resources on the seafloor.¹⁰²

Setting aside for a moment the details of terms and phrases and the question of who was first to come up with the common heritage concept, the United States’ suspicions concerning Malta’s initiative were still legitimate. Why would the Maltese ambassador, of all people, be interested in talking about resources on the ocean floor? There are several possible ways to explain this. One is from Arvid Pardo’s own perspective, of which we have some knowledge from letters and explanatory articles in the aftermath of the convention. But it could also be explained through the various political and diplomatic climates in Malta, the US Senate and the United Nations, where different proposals were brought forward and discussed openly throughout 1967.

5 Arvid Pardo’s Interest in Ocean Governance

There is a hint of esotericism and a tendency towards mystical explanations when the origins of ‘great ideas’ are revisited. We cannot know whether Pardo really dreamed about the seafloor, but parts of his speech at the United Nations have a dreamy, mystical quality, quite at odds with the character of a hard-headed, stoic diplomat. Maybe this was part of Pardo’s personality. At any rate, this is how he remembered the story towards the end of his life.¹¹⁰

From the perspective of content, his first point about the USA’s seabed study proposal from 1966 is rather more interesting.¹¹¹ So far, only references to the study have been found,¹¹² pointing to a discussion item at the United Nations.¹¹³ We can assume that after Truman’s 1945 proclamation on the resources of the sea, seabed resources were discussed in different circles both in the United States and at the United Nations. In fact, Ranganathan addresses this issue when she writes that Pardo’s initiative was ‘only one among numbers of initiatives of the time, many connected to the UN in some way, and some with more comprehensive subject matter, taking in the seabed and the high seas’.¹¹⁴ Furthermore, she points out that ‘As early as 1963, a corporate executive suggested the UN assume title to the international seabed and allocate exploitation rights generating revenue for itself’.¹¹⁵

It is likely, therefore, that countries like the US would have requested studies on seabed resources, and that they also conducted studies themselves. Since unclos ii had left several questions on how to govern the oceans outside national jurisdiction unanswered, there is little doubt that politicians all over the world sought to explore these issues. Clearly, so did Malta. Apart from Pardo’s personal reminiscences about how he became interested in the seafloor and the questions of seabed governance, there is a bigger picture surrounding the Maltese initiative. We must consider the political and historical context of the newly independent archipelagic state, and how the Maltese initiative got to the United Nations.

6 Malta Prepares the Seabed Proposal

If we are to believe Arvid Pardo, he contacted Victor Gauci¹¹⁶ – a diplomat who worked for the government of Malta – to help him discuss ideas on seabed governance with the Ministry of Commonwealth and Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately, the exact content of the earlier drafts of his speech is uncertain, since they cannot be found in his material. It is likely that the common heritage of mankind principle was central. He reported in his later letter to Busuttil that he had ‘asked Victor to test the interest of some poor countries (but not the major powers) in the sea’.¹¹⁷ How Victor Gauci tested this interest is unknown, but since he worked as a diplomat, we can only guess that he may have had contacts at the United Nations.¹¹⁸ Ranganathan goes so far as to suggest that Arvid Pardo was ‘headhunted’¹¹⁹ for the job to ‘establish a voice in international affairs’.¹²⁰

The proposal was followed by a memorandum in which the unregulated use of the seabed resources was problematised and an international agency was proposed as one possible solution to oversee seabed activity.¹²³

In reply to his proposal, the plenary put the seabed question on the agenda and promised to put it forward to the General Assembly.¹³² And as we already know, the next step in the seabed proposal quarrel was Arvid Pardo’s speech at the First Committee Meeting of the UN General Assembly on 1 November 1967.

7 The Seabed Committee Is Born

The establishment and preparation of the committee was somewhat complicated. It started with twenty-seven states, who prepared a draft resolution on how the ad hoc committee might look and what tasks it might have. The resolution was then presented by Belgium.¹³⁶ The ad hoc committee ended up having thirty-five member states, with Malta being one of them.¹³⁷ The committee’s task was to collect together all existing knowledge about the governance of the ocean floor and the evolving technological possibilities that could arise in this area, and to prepare for an international convocation.

This process was similar to previous attempts to prepare for a new Law of the Sea. The League of Nations had set up a comparable ‘Committee of Experts’ back in 1924, with the brief of gathering information about the Law of the Sea.¹³⁸ After World War ii, this task had been taken over by the International Law Commission (ilc), which was instructed by the General Assembly to work up a list of issues to be addressed at the first Law of the Sea Convention in 1958.¹³⁹ Now, after two semi-successful conferences (unclos i and unclos ii), the Ad Hoc Seabed Committee was set up to handle similar tasks to those undertaken before them by the Committee of Experts and the ilc. The job of the ad hoc committee was to collect information in preparation for a third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

In 1969, the committee went from being an ad hoc committee to being officially called the Seabed Committee. It now had forty-two member states, with some changes in membership.¹⁴⁰ In the book The Law of the Sea in our Time – ii The United Nations Seabed Committee 1968–1973, Shigeru Oda, who was the committee’s Japanese representative, provides a detailed run-through of all committee meetings from 1968–73. Although the book is written from the Japanese perspective, it gives us an in-depth report of the Seabed Committee’s business, from the minutiae of rescheduled meetings to the matters that were discussed and the proposals put forward by various representatives.

It was also decided that the committee would handle the preparations for the impending convention. This task made the Seabed Committee an interesting prospect for people who wanted to shape or influence future discussions on the Law of the Sea.