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Laying Tracks for Bajan Goutis to Run
Posted: Tuesday, January 15, 2008
By Stephen Kangal
January 15, 2008
It must be a source of enormous embarrassment to us in T&T that the Manning Administration should spend our taxpayers money to jointly sponsor in collaboration with the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf a seminar. It will outline the procedures for the delimitation of the maritime boundaries of the extended continental shelf (Newsday 14 Jan., p. 15) between national and international jurisdiction located beyond 200 nautical miles (limits of the Exclusive Economic Zone). This is a clear case of stupid T&T paying for the laying of tracks for smart Bajan agoutis to run on.
I am submitting again, as I have done regularly on the media post 11 April 2006, without fear of any contradiction whatsoever that resulting from the Award of the Ad Hoc Arbitral Tribunal and not the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague as stated, handed down on 11 April 2006, T&T no longer exercises any rights over resources of an extended continental shelf in any part of the maritime areas appertaining to T&T by the law of the sea. Why this Seminar in T&T therefore?
Accordingly providing and paying for the holding of a platform at the Crown Plaza for the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf beyond 200 miles to assist inter alia, T&T to submit a potential claim to be ratified by this Commission relating to extended continental shelf claims is an exercise in futility if not propaganda and sheer stupidity from a T&T perspective. This seminar is violates our national interest.
I can understand why potential extended continental states such as Barbados, Guyana, Suriname etc will want to attend the seminar at T&T expense. But T&T is not in the category of states capable of making any potential continental shelf claim beyond 200 miles.
Former Attorney-General John Jeremie in his Senate Statement of the day that the judgment was released bequeathed us a legacy of deception and deliberate misrepresentation when he misled the Senate. He deceived us into believing until today that the Tribunal had allocated to us a high seas corridor to the Atlantic, continental shelf rights beyond 200 nautical miles and had ruled in T&T's favour in the dispute.
Whatever extended continental shelf rights (beyond 200 miles) we possessed and exercised jurisdiction and control over for more than twenty four years based on the provisions of the 1990 T&T/ Venezuela Delimitation Agreement ( up to the terminal Point 22 of that Agreement was 300 nautical miles from T&T) were taken away from us arbitrarily by the contaminated Judgment issued by the said Arbitral Tribunal.
Accordingly T&T is now both shelf-locked and zone-locked by Barbados to the North and Venezuela to the South because at no point can it ever extend its maritime claims beyond 200 nautical miles.
What the Seminar will in fact succeed in achieving is to provide Barbados with all the technical and legal expertise and information that will now enable that country to develop and submit to the UN Commission on The Limits of the Continental Shelf a very strong and irrefutable claim designed to exercise control over hydrocarbon-bearing submarine areas that were formerly clearly under the maritime jurisdiction and control of T&T.
Geologically speaking Barbados' continental shelf (coral formation) stops or breaks very near to its coasts (the natural prolongation principle). Barbados suffers from what the Tribunal would term "a fundamental natural geological discontinuity" that separates the coral continental shelf of Barbados from the sedimentary measures of Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.
The submarine areas that Barbados will be targeting in its claim to the UN Commission is in fact and from a geological viewpoint the continuation of the natural sedimentary prolongation (continental shelf) of both Venezuela and T&T and not of Barbados. So that the Government of T&T is paying money to host a Seminar at the Crowne Plaza to enable technocrats from Barbados to consolidate, strengthen and perform the final rites in their case for taking over our extended shelf resources (Hydrocarbons and metallic nodules) and legitimately claiming them as its own maritime patrimony.
Shades of the Sparrow calypso.
The attached Map V shows the terminal point 11 (200 nautical miles from T&T) of the TT/Barbados Maritime Boundary fixed by the Arbitral Tribunal.
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