hankyoreh

By Park Byong-su, staff reporter

The South Korean government submitted a report on Dec. 26 to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) claiming that the continental shelf on the country’s southern coast extends more than 200 nautical miles to the Okinawa Trough.

On Dec. 27, a senior official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade explained that the report put the boundary of the South Korean continental shelf approximately five nautical miles from Japanese territorial waters near the Okinawa Islands (12 nautical miles).

The senior official added that the borders were between 38km and 125km closer to Japan than in figures submitted in a preliminary report in May 2009.

The total area of continental shelf farther than 200 nautical miles from the South Korean coast was also more than double the area given in a 2009 preliminary document.

The government’s report was submitted according to the terms of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which requires a country to submit a report when claiming that an area more than 200 nautical miles from its coast is part of its continental shelf.

Countries are entitled to claim the ocean floor and subsoil within 200 nautical miles of their coast as continental shelf, which gives them exclusive rights to resource exploration and extraction. But to claim an area farther out, they have to prove that the ocean floor there is a natural extension of their continental land mass.

The CLCS will post the South Korean report on online for three months, after which it will hear the country‘s official case during a general meeting in either July or October.

But experts viewed the chances of the committee holding a review of the report as slight. Explaining that the review would not go ahead if neighboring countries object, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade official said that Japan has been calling South Korea’s claims a violation of its maritime rights.

But the official added that the report has “great declarative significance in terms of South Korea asserting its right to this continental shelf”.

“The final demarcation of the continental shelf in the East China Sea will have been to be decided through negotiations between South Korea, China, and Japan,” the official said.

On Dec. 14, 2012, China also submitted a document to the CLCS, which claimed that the Chinese continental shelf extends to the Okinawa trough. Therefore, the claims of South Korea, China and Japan all overlap in certain areas.

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