The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

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The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is an international treaty that governs the use of the world’s oceans. On November 16, 1994, after getting the required sixty signatures, the Law of the Sea Treaty became an international law. Today, 143 countries are a part of the UNCLOS. However, the U.S. is not part of it for many reasons.
In 1993, the Department of Defense supplied an Ocean Policy Review Paper on “the currency and adequacy of U.S. ocean policy, from the strategic standpoint, to support the national defense strategy,” which established that U.S. national security interests in the oceans have been protected even though the U.S. is not in the UNCLOS (U.S. D.O.D. 76-94). The practices of the United States over the course of the last 300 years has created the very routine law of the sea that is the foundation of UNCLOS’s navigational provisions. Therefore it is not right to say that the U.S. may benefit from the convention’s navigational provisions if it were to join it (Groves).
The United States protects its navigational rights by diplomatically protesting naval assertions made by other nations and by conducting operational activities with the U.S. naval forces to fight these claims. Even before the adoption of UNCLOS in 1982, the United States had ordered protests and led naval actions to fight the nautical claims by other nations (Roach 7-8).
If the United States joined the convention it would cause a treacherous and permanent loss of American power. It would necessitate the U.S. Treasury to send over tens, maybe even hundreds, of billions of dollars to a peculiar international organization in Jamaica. Then this organization is authorized to redistribute those American dollars to countries with in...

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... that the United States does not need to accomplish universal international acknowledgement of its ECS to provide confidence to oil drilling and refining companies (Groves)
The UNCLOS is a convention that is put into place to help protect the world’s oceans. However there many types of corruption within it that would harm America if it joined the convention. The United States would have to pay a large sum of money for the suspected pollution that it might have caused. Also the U.S. would have to pay royalties of their earnings from their oil exploration on the continental shelf to the ISA. Also the use of UNCLOS would be seen as useless to us for navigational rights because America actually created the very routine for the Law of the Sea regarding navigation. If America was to enter the UNCLOS it would be a waste of money and time and would only the American people.

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