Sedentary Fisheries and the Convention on the Continental Shelf

Abstract

The Convention on the Continental Shelf of April 29, 1958—one of the works of the first United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea— declares in Article 2(1) that the “coastal State exercises over the continental shelf sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring it and exploiting its natural resources.” The fourth paragraph of the same article defines these resources as the mineral and other non-living resources of the seabed and subsoil together with living organisms belonging to sedentary species, that is to say, organisms which, at the harvestable stage, either are immobile on or under the seabed or are unable to move except in constant physical contact with the seabed or the subsoil.