Who owns the straits?

Sam Sifton NY Times - Scholars have argued for centuries that no state can lay claim to the high seas, the ocean common. One jurist from the Dutch Golden Age came up with a term for it: mare liberum, or free sea.

Which is fine out in the middle of an ocean. It gets a little more complicated closer to shore, and particularly with choke points like the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, the United States has argued that it has a right to freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, in contrast, has said that it can regulate traffic there.

By what right? Can a nation declare the waters off its coastline as its own? How far out do those waters extend?

I picked up some light reading: “Legal Vortex in the Strait of Hormuz,” a 2014 paper by James Kraska, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. It could have been written much more recently — like, in February. We spoke yesterday. Kraska has seen this conflict coming for more than a decade.

What’s going on in the strait is fundamentally a legal dispute, he told me. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a kind of international constitution for the oceans, governs passage there. Neither Washington nor Tehran has ratified it, but it reflects “customary international law,” which means it is still supposed to be binding, Kraska told me.

In other words, Iran can claim that its territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from its shoreline, which is permitted by the treaty, but only if it recognizes the right of free navigation through those waters. (Free navigation, Kraska noted. Charging a toll, as Iran hopes to do, would break the law.)