South Korea plans to submit a formal claim to an extended portion of its continental shelf to a U.N. agency within a month or two, a government official said Monday, adding heat to already heightened territorial tension across East Asia.
The Foreign Ministry has been readying official documents to present to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf scheduled to convene a seven-week session on Jan. 21, 2013. A member country should file its reports three months beforehand for a scientific and technical review.
In line with its preliminary reports filed in May 2009, the ministry plans to maintain that the country’s continental shelves “naturally” stretch to the Okinawa Trough in the East China Sea. The area is believed to hold crude and natural gas deposits 10 times larger than those in Saudi Arabia.
The ministry will turn in the claim within this year “for certain, but we’re discussing the precise date,” a senior official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Seoul and Beijing, which share a largely similar position, have been cooperating to counter Tokyo’s maritime assertiveness. But the official declined comment on whether the two sides plan a joint report as they did in 2009 for initial documents.
The plan comes while Japan and China are entangled in a diplomatic row over the islands of Senkaku or Diaoyu in the East China Sea. Tokyo has also claimed Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo in the East Sea.
In May, Tokyo erroneously announced that the U.N. body had recognized around 310,000 square kilometers as its continental shelf with a cluster of Pacific reefs called Okinotori being a base point. Seoul and Beijing dismissed it as a “groundless ambition to maximize maritime profits.”
The outer limit of an exclusive economic zone typically does not exceed 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from the baselines. But under the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea, about 160 coastal member countries can claim control of the underlying seabed beyond that limit by proving the ocean floor is connected to its continental shelf.
The agency then reviews the documents and offers a recommendation, establishing a legal basis for a country to exercise rights of access to seabed resources within the boundaries. But if other members resist, it tables the proposal until the stakeholders settle themselves.
By Shin Hyon-hee (
heeshin@heraldcorp.com)
