The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea: What One Observer Has Learned from This Attempt to Strengthen International Order

Since 1974 the United Nations has been negotiating a comprehensive treaty on all aspects of the sea and its uses, culminating in 1980 in an Informal Draft Convention which some 150 nations agreed would be completed and signed in 1981. Non-governmental organizations have been vital ingredients in the process of consensus-building. Whatever the future, with the Reagan Administration´s upturning of the timetable with its plans to review the treaty before further negotiation, the fact that a hundred complex issues could be reduced to four by nations with strong and disparate interests shows that given political will, trust, and a heavy input of information, consensus-negotiating does work.