9 - The law on straight baselines for coastal Archipelagos

Summary

Geographical requirements for a coastal Archipelago

The geography required for the application of the straight baseline system was laid down by the International Court of Justice in the Fisheries Case of 1951. Having stated that the breadth of the territorial sea should be measured from the low-water mark, the Court examined three methods of implementing the low-water mark rule: the tracé parallèle, the arcs of circles, and the straight baseline system. It was in its discussion of the method of the tracé parallèle that the Court, in effect, described the kind of coast required for the application of the straight baseline system.

Where a coast is deeply indented and cut into, as is that of Eastern Finmark, or where it is bordered by an Archipelago such as the ‘skjaergaard’ along the western sector of the coast here in question, the base-line becomes independent of the low-water mark, and can only be determined by means of a geometrical construction.

Two observations should be made about this passage. First, the straight baseline system is made applicable to two types of coast:' where it is deeply indented or where it is bordered by an Archipelago'. Of course, a coast could have both of those characteristics either in whole or in part. The other observation relates to the second type of coast, that is ‘where it is bordered by an archipelago such as the “skjaergaard”’.