Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A ship or a state

In recent years several companies (Feedom ship, The Seasteading istitute) claimed of their ability to construct great ships or semblances of vessels which would be of no need to enter seaports. An autonomos artificial territory in the high seas. What legal status will it have?
International law demands a ship to have a flag of the state. Otherwise it may be boarded and seized on the high seas. So let's assume our Giant Ship (GS) has a Mongolian flag. A genuine link between the state of the flag and the ship is demanded. It can be created by registrating an engineering company in Mongolia.
The GS is already constructed, it has permanent habitants. They claim to create new state. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States lays down the following criteria of statehood: 1 - a permanent population, 2 - a defined territory, 3 - government and 4 - capacity to enter into relations with other states. According to the 3rd point goverment should exercise effective control over the territory. In our case GS government for sure will control "territory" much better than Mongolia, which is a sealocked country with no navy. Of course GS doesn't have territory in the classical meaning, but today boards of military aircrafts and ships are treated as the state's territory.
Thus we have some vague legal grounds for creating new states with artificial territory.

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A ship or a state by lysogora is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.