This question is inspired by China’s recent efforts to annex the Spratley islands. Suppose a new island emerges in the South pacific-and the USA decides we would like it as a base. Do you just land troops on it and declare it taken? On old globes, you still see vast pieces of antarctic-claimed by NZ, France, Argentina, Chile, etc.-these claims are invalid, but what laws govern who gets to take islands that are:
-unclaimed
-uninhabited
Regarding the Spratley Islands, China is making new islands (by pumping sand into walled enclosures (on top of sand banks). isn’t this essentially what the Dutch have been doing for centuries (reclaiming land from the seas)?
No judgement of China’s actions here, i would just like to know how nations get to claim islands in the middle of nowhere.
Under international law as it stands today, all the symbolic acts like raising flags or landing troops are little more than grandstanding without any legal effect. What customary international law requires is effective control; the claimant state needs to establish effective control, in the sense of the type of control that states usually exercise over their territory. That requires a permanent population (which can be of a military nature) and some kind of public administration going on.
Unless, of course, the newly created island is already within a state’s territorial waters (the continental shelf or the exclusive economic zone are, AFAIK, not sufficient, but I’d have to check that). In that case it is not terra nullius but already under that state’s jurisdiction.
The incidence of new islands appearing is very low, and if you exclude cases where the sovereign owner is obvious, like Surtsey and the new Japanese island in the Ogasawara chain, almost non-existent. Even if a new island emerged in the South Pacific, it would likely be clearly “in” the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, French Polynesia or whatever.
In the Spratlys, China did not lay claim to a new island - the Chinese territorial claim predates the island-building. Similarly for Okinotorishima. So (if you accept the Chinese claim as valid), it is just Dutch-style land reclamation.
Some like to considerthe UK’s claiming of Rockallin 1955 as its last gasp of empire building!
It’s not that the claims are “invalid.” The countries still claim sovereignty, and some of them recognize the claims of the others.
And some of the claims overlap. Also, the position of both Russia and the United States is that they don’t claim any lands in Antarctica, but reserve their right to do so. In the case of the US, Marie Byrd Land, the largest unclaimed chunk of real estate on the planet, would be a very viable claim. The US was more or less in the process of formalizing their claims when the Antarctic Treaty was signed.
Actually happened a few years back, and just recently. The new volcanic islands clearly belong to Tonga:
Um. I’m not sure what you mean by “more or less in the process of formalizing their claims”, and the way the sentence is structured could suggest to the unwary that the US process was derailed by some external event.
The US convened the conference at which the Antartic Treaty was negotiated and invited the participants in that conference, and is the depositary authority for the Treaty (as in, states wishing to accede to the Treaty deposit their instruments of ratification with the US Govermment). It was in the first group of (twelve) countries to sign the Treaty, on 1 December 1959, and it was one of the earliest countries to ratify the Treaty (on 18 August 1960). The Treaty entered into force on 23 June 1961 (when all 12 of the orginal signatories had ratified it). Far from cutting across the objective of the US, the Treaty was very much the outcome of US efforts.
While the US reserves the right to claim areas of the Antarcic, is has never claimed any, and it has not recognised the claims of any of the seven states which have claimed parts of the continent. The Treaty itself provides that no new claims are to be advanced; the US has always respected that.
A quick look at a map might offer one reason why a number of countries are upset about China’s claim on the Spratly Islands. Kinda like Florida making a claim for Long Island.
Considering the demographics around here, it’s more like Long Island has claimed (and colonized!) FL. 