What is UNCLOS ? Explain its salient features.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was adopted in 1982 and entered into force in 1994. Negotiated over nine years at the third conference, it is often called the constitution for the oceans because it replaced a patchwork of customary rules and earlier Geneva conventions with a single framework.

The maritime zones, measured from the baseline:

• Internal waters — landward of the baseline, full sovereignty.
• Territorial sea — up to 12 nautical miles, sovereignty subject to the right of innocent passage for foreign ships.
• Contiguous zone — to 24 nautical miles, where the coastal state may enforce customs, fiscal, immigration and sanitary laws.
• Exclusive Economic Zone — to 200 nautical miles, giving sovereign rights over living and non-living resources and jurisdiction over artificial islands, marine scientific research and environmental protection, while others retain freedoms of navigation, overflight and cable-laying. The EEZ is the convention's central innovation.
• Continental shelf — to 200 nautical miles, extendable to 350 on submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
• The high seas, open to all, and the Area — the seabed beyond national jurisdiction, declared the common heritage of mankind and administered by the International Seabed Authority.

Institutions. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Seabed Authority, and the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, with compulsory dispute settlement under Part XV — the basis of the Philippines' 2016 arbitral award against China, which China rejected.

Other features. Archipelagic states and their sea lanes, transit passage through international straits, protection of the marine environment, and the 2023 agreement on marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.

India ratified in 1995, has settled its maritime boundary with Bangladesh through arbitration in 2014, and invokes UNCLOS in the South China Sea while the United States has still not ratified it.