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Articles

1998: Vol. LXXV, No. 1

On the Errors in the Delimitation of Maritime Spaces

Soumise
juin 12, 2015
Publié-e
2015-05-21

Résumé

The Law of the Sea tacitly assumes that the boundaries delimiting maritime and other spaces on the earth surface are known exactly. This is clearly unwarranted: like any position on the surface of the earth, maritime boundaries have positional errors associated with them. Yet the assumption of boundaries being errorless is shared not only amongst the lawyers, but amongst the mariners as well. The usual attitude encountered in maritime practice is: yes, there may be some errors in the boundaries, but these are so small that they are practically irrelevant. In the case of trespassing, the only uncertainty ever taken into consideration is the uncertainty of the trespasser’s position vis-a-vis the boundary in question. In this contribution, we are going to discuss the errors in the boundaries from the technical point of view. We shall try to answer the following questions: 1) How large can the errors in maritime boundaries be and do they matter? 2) Where are these errors coming from? 3) What can be done to eliminate the gross errors and keep the systematic errors to a minimum? 4) What can be done with the random errors?