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high seas

 
Dictionary: high seas
 

pl.n.

The open waters of an ocean or a sea beyond the limits of the territorial jurisdiction of a country: piracy on the high seas.


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Idioms: high seas
 

Open waters of an ocean or sea, beyond the territorial jurisdiction of a country. For example, Commercial fishermen are being forced to go out on the high seas in order to make a living. [c. 1100]


 
US Military Dictionary: high seas
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(the high seas) the open ocean, especially that not within any country's jurisdiction.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

 

In maritime law, the waters lying outside the territorial waters of any and all states. In the Middle Ages, a number of maritime states asserted sovereignty over large portions of the high seas. The doctrine that the high seas in time of peace are open to all nations was first proposed by Hugo Grotius (1609), but it did not become an accepted principle of international law until the 19th century. Activities permitted on the high seas include navigation, fishing, the laying of submarine cables and pipelines, and overflight of aircraft.

For more information on high seas, visit Britannica.com.

 
Wikipedia: International waters
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International Ownership Treaties
Antarctic Treaty System
Law of the Sea
Outer Space Treaty
Moon Treaty
International waters
Extraterrestrial real estate

The terms international waters or trans-boundary waters apply where any of the following types of bodies of water (or their drainage basins) transcend international boundaries: oceans, large marine ecosystems, enclosed or semi-enclosed regional seas and estuaries, rivers, lakes, groundwater systems (aquifers), and wetlands. [1]

Oceans, seas, and waters outside of national jurisdiction are also referred to as the high seas or, in Latin, mare liberum.

Ships sailing the high seas are generally under the jurisdiction of the flag state (but this is obsolete as of November 16, 1994[2]), since due to cases of piracy and slave trade, any nation can exercise jurisdiction under the doctrine of hostis humani generis presuming they enter the nation's sovereign waters. Mare liberum still applies to this day as not all nations have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty, yet some nations still abide by the doctrine. Mare Liberum is the 'freedom of the sea,' where all jurisdictions are quashed in modern legal systems except those under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; this will be the case until all nations have signed and ratified the treaty. For these reasons international law is obfuscated.

High seas highlighted in blue.

Contents

International waterways

Sea areas in international rights

Several international treaties have established freedom of navigation on semi-enclosed seas.

Other international treaties have opened up rivers, which are not traditionally international waterways.

  • The Danube River has been internationalized so that landlocked Austria, Hungary and former Czechoslovakia (now only Slovakia) has access to the Danube, and southern Germany (Germany itself is not landlocked, having access to both the North Sea and Baltic Sea) could have secure access to the Black Sea.

Disputes over International waters

For more information see Territorial claims in the Arctic and Northwest Passage.

Current unresolved disputes over whether particular waters are "International waters" include:

International waters agreements

Global agreements

Regional agreements

At least ten conventions are included within the Regional Seas Program of UNEP, including:

  1. the Atlantic Coast of West and Central Africa (Convention for Co-operation in the Protection and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the West and Central African Region; and Protocol (1981)
  2. the North-East Pacific (Antigua Convention);
  3. the Mediterranean (Barcelona Convention);
  4. the wider Caribbean (Cartagena Convention);
  5. the South-East Pacific (Lima Convention, 1986);
  6. the South Pacific (Nouméa Convention);
  7. the East African seaboard (Nairobi Convention, 1985);
  8. the Kuwait region (Kuwait Convention);
  9. the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (Jeddah Convention).

Addressing regional freshwater issues is the 1992 Helsinki Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (UNECE/Helsinki Water Convention)

Water body-specific agreements

International waters institutions

Freshwater institutions

Marine institutions

See also

References

  1. ^ International Waters, United Nations Development Programme
  2. ^ This being the date that UNCLOS came into force, [1]

External links


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Idioms. The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
US Military Dictionary. The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "International waters" Read more

 

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