ABSTRACT
The coastal states around the North Sea have shared out the rights to its seabed oil and gas by drawing dividing lines based mainly on equidistance from coasts, on the authority of the 1958 UNCLOS convention on the ‘continental shelf’ (6). Britain – largely thanks to its Shetland and Orkney islands – and Norway got most of the oil. Later, Britain and France fixed a dividing line running down the Channel, with the British Channel Islands in a small sea enclave on the French side of the line. As to some of the Irish-British dividing lines, disputes were less easily resolved because Ireland rejected Britain’s argument that baselines should be drawn from small islands, including the uninhabitable Rockall islet, which Britain had formally annexed.
