When island nations drown, who owns their seas? - Ideas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/when-island-nations-drown-who-owns-their-seas/hyH9W5b1mCAyTVgwlFh7qO/story.html
Kiribati, like other island nations, controls hundreds of thousands of square miles of the ocean that surrounds it. Kiribati’s land area is about that of Kansas City, while the ocean territory it controls is larger than India. Within these “exclusive economic zones,” to use the UN term, island nations possess the power to regulate, tax, or disallow any economic activity, including mining or drilling for oil. The tuna fishing alone in the domain of Pacific island nations is worth an estimated $4 billion a year.
“An equitable and fair solution,” (...) “would be the recognition in international law of a new category of State, ‘the deterritorialized state.’” (...) Remarkably, such a landless state does exist today. The Knights of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta) are a 900-year-old lay Catholic order who today have no land, but do have a nonvoting seat at the United Nations. Their example, Rayfuse suggests, provides a seamless way to incorporate submerged nations into the international community.
