Free Republic

US President Ronald Reagan has decided not to sign a long debated international treaty on the use and exploitation of the sea already adopted by 130 countries, including Canada, the Whitehouse said yesterday

The 400-year-old freedom of the high seas would be lost under United Nations plans to limit environmental damage. Military forces of several nations are in discussions with conservationists over pooling surveillance resources to enforce the changes. The “freedom of the seas” has given mariners legal rights to roam the high seas — a boundary that usually occurs 200 nautical miles from shore — at will. Specialists gathered at a London conference are saying that fishermen have been pushing the concept too far. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1983 and enshrined the...

Angering conservatives on the critical issue of national sovereignty, the Bush Administration is supporting a plan by Senator Joseph Biden, D-De., to stage a Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 27 in order to usher the controversial U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty to the Senate floor for a quick vote. Biden, chairman of the committee and a Democratic presidential candidate, was a leader of the effort to defeat Bush’s pick of John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Conservatives are hoping the facts about President Reagan’s rejection of the measure, mainly on the grounds that it was a...