Ninety-Eight Submissions Ask the UN Where Their Seabed Ends. The Body That Answers Them Is Barred From Settling a Single Boundary.

by Karim Haddad · September 8, 2026

World Affairs Correspondent, The Globe Ledger

Every few months a government announces that its continental shelf reaches further out to sea than anyone had previously recorded, and the announcement is reported as though a world authority had granted something. There is a body involved. It sits in New York, it has been working since the late 1990s, and what it produces is not a grant, not a map and not a border. It produces recommendations, and the treaty that created it expressly forbids those recommendations from touching the question most readers assume is at stake.

The instrument is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Its Article 76(1) defines the continental shelf as comprising, in the treaty's words, “the seabed and subsoil of the submarine areas that extend beyond its territorial sea throughout the natural prolongation of its land territory to the outer edge of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured where the outer edge of the continental margin does not extend up to that distance.” Two tests, and a coastal State gets whichever gives it more.

Inside 200 nautical miles, nothing has to be applied for. Article 77 states that the coastal State's rights over the shelf “do not depend on occupation, effective or notional, or on any express proclamation,” and that they are exclusive: if the coastal State does not explore or exploit, “no one may undertake these activities without the express consent of the coastal State.” The shelf is not a claim that has to be established. It exists as a matter of law from the moment the land does.

Beyond 200 nautical miles the geology has to be proved, and the Convention sets out how. Article 76(4) offers two alternative lines: one drawn by reference to points where the thickness of sedimentary rock is at least 1 per cent of the distance back to the foot of the continental slope, the other by reference to fixed points no more than 60 nautical miles from that foot of slope. Article 76(5) then caps the result — the outer limit lines “shall not exceed 350 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured or shall not exceed 100 nautical miles from the 2,500 metre isobath.” Article 76(6) holds submarine ridges to the 350-mile cap, while exempting “submarine elevations that are natural components of the continental margin, such as its plateaux, rises, caps, banks and spurs.” The distinction between a ridge and an elevation has occupied hydrographers for a quarter of a century.

Article 76(8) is where the Commission enters, and it is worth reading slowly. Information on limits beyond 200 nautical miles is submitted to the Commission; “The Commission shall make recommendations to coastal States on matters related to the establishment of the outer limits of their continental shelf. The limits of the shelf established by a coastal State on the basis of these recommendations shall be final and binding.” The finality attaches to limits the State establishes on the basis of a recommendation. It does not attach to the recommendation, and it does not arrive automatically.

Annex II to the Convention sets out who does the work. The Commission “shall consist of 21 members who shall be experts in the field of geology, geophysics or hydrography,” elected for terms of five years by States Parties, with a two-thirds majority of votes required to be elected. Under Annex II Article 5 the detailed examination of a submission goes to a sub-commission of seven members, “appointed in a balanced manner taking into account the specific elements of each submission,” and under Article 6 the plenary approves a sub-commission's recommendations “by a majority of two thirds of Commission members present and voting.” Twenty-one earth scientists, working in sevens, on files that run to thousands of pages of seismic and bathymetric data.

And then Annex II Article 9, one sentence long: “The actions of the Commission shall not prejudice matters relating to delimitation of boundaries between States with opposite or adjacent coasts.” The body of the Convention says the same of itself. Article 76(10) reads in full: “The provisions of this article are without prejudice to the question of delimitation of the continental shelf between States with opposite or adjacent coasts.” Where two countries' shelves overlap, the Commission is not the forum. That is left to negotiation between the States concerned, or to the International Court of Justice, or to an arbitral tribunal, or to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — anywhere but the room where the science is assessed.

The Commission has gone further in its own Rules of Procedure, which carry an annex headed “Submissions in case of a dispute between States with opposite or adjacent coasts or in other cases of unresolved land or maritime disputes.” In the revision issued as CLCS/3/Rev.3 on 6 February 2001, that Annex I provided that “In cases where a land or maritime dispute exists, the Commission shall not examine and qualify a submission made by any of the States concerned in the dispute,” with a single opening: “However, the Commission may examine one or more submissions in the areas under dispute with prior consent given by all States that are parties to such a dispute.” Its paragraph 5(b) added that “The submissions made before the Commission and the recommendations adopted by the Commission thereon shall not prejudice the position of States which are parties to a land or maritime dispute.” One objection from one neighbour is enough to park a file indefinitely.

That revision is no longer the operative text. The Commission's rules have been reissued three times since — as CLCS/40 on 2 July 2004, CLCS/40/Rev.1 on 17 April 2008 and CLCS/40/Rev.2 on 4 October 2024, the last of which the United Nations describes as superseding and replacing the earlier documents containing rules of procedure, CLCS/3/Rev.3 among them. The Globe Ledger was not able to obtain the text of the current annex, and the wording quoted above is that of the 2001 revision. What can be checked is that the mechanism it describes was still operating three decades into the Commission's life.

In the Chair's statement on the Commission's sixtieth session — held from 22 January to 8 March 2024 and issued as CLCS/60/2 on 21 March 2024 — the Commission recorded that, absent consent given by all States that were parties to the disputes that had caused their deferral, it was “not yet in a position to commence the consideration” of a list of submissions, among them Myanmar's and Yemen's submission in respect of the area south-east of Socotra Island. The same statement lists the handful of submissions then under active examination by sub-commissions: Mauritius for Rodrigues Island, Palau, Portugal, Spain for Galicia, Trinidad and Tobago, Namibia, Cuba in the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil's equatorial margin, the Cook Islands' Manihiki Plateau and Iceland's Reykjanes Ridge among them. The queue moves at the speed of seven-person teams meeting a few weeks a year.

There is also no appeal in the ordinary sense. Annex II Article 8 provides that “In the case of disagreement by the coastal State with the recommendations of the Commission, the coastal State shall… make a revised or new submission.” A State that dislikes the answer does not challenge it; it goes back to the seabed, gathers more data and files again. The Commission's public register carries eleven such revised submissions alongside the originals.

That register is the plainest measure of how the system actually performs. When The Globe Ledger consulted the Commission's list of submissions on 8 September 2026, it ran to ninety-eight numbered original submissions and eleven revised ones. The first, from the Russian Federation, is dated 20 December 2001. The most recent is Chile's, concerning the Juan Fernández Archipelago region, dated 18 November 2025. Fewer than half of the ninety-eight rows carried a date in the column recording recommendations adopted by the Commission — the Commission publishes no running total, and the register itself is the only place that tally exists. Twenty-five years of work, and most of the filings are still waiting for an answer.

The deadline for filing has its own tangled history. Annex II Article 4 requires a coastal State to submit “within 10 years of the entry into force of this Convention for that State.” Because the Commission's Scientific and Technical Guidelines did not exist for the Convention's first years, the Meeting of States Parties decided in SPLOS/72 of 29 May 2001 that for any State for which the Convention had entered into force before 13 May 1999, the ten-year clock would start on 13 May 1999 instead. A further decision, SPLOS/183, addressed the Commission's workload and the ability of States, particularly developing States, to meet Article 4 — and allowed the deadline to be satisfied by depositing preliminary information indicative of the outer limits. China's 2009 filing, made under that decision, states that the preliminary information it submits “is without prejudice to its future submission in accordance with the requirements of article 76 of the Convention.” A deadline was met without a submission being made.

What lies beyond any national shelf is the Area, administered by the International Seabed Authority, which is why the extension of a shelf is not a private matter between neighbours. The Convention prices the overlap directly. Article 82 requires a coastal State to make payments in respect of exploitation of non-living resources beyond 200 nautical miles: nothing for five years, then “For the sixth year, the rate of payment or contribution shall be 1 per cent of the value or volume of production at the site,” rising by one point a year “until the twelfth year” and staying at 7 per cent thereafter, with a developing State that is a net importer of the mineral exempt. The money goes through the Authority, to be distributed to States Parties on equitable-sharing criteria. A country that wins an outer shelf inherits a royalty obligation with it.

The whole apparatus rests on membership of the Convention, and membership is not universal. The Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea's chronological list of ratifications of, accessions and successions to the Convention ran to 172 entries when consulted on 8 September 2026, Cambodia the most recent at number 172, on 6 February 2026. The Division's status table — the version published as at 31 July 2019 — shows no signature date and no ratification or accession date for the United States against the Convention itself, while recording it as a signatory of the 1994 Part XI Agreement on 29 July 1994 and a party to the Fish Stocks Agreement from 21 August 1996. The largest naval power in the world is outside the treaty that built the Commission.

So the honest description of what happens when a country announces a wider seabed is this. It has filed a technical case with twenty-one earth scientists. It may wait a decade or more for a sub-commission to reach it. It may never be examined at all if a neighbour objects and withholds consent. If it gets a recommendation, the limits become final and binding only once the State establishes them on that basis and deposits the charts with the Secretary-General under Article 76(9). And whatever comes back, the one thing it cannot be is a boundary: by Annex II Article 9 and Article 76(10) alike, nothing the Commission does prejudices the delimitation of the shelf between that country and the country next door.

The seabed map, in other words, is not being drawn by a world authority. It is being assembled slowly, file by file, out of geology certified in one process and boundaries settled — where they are settled at all — in an entirely different one.