A/HRC/55/49 III. International law A. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 50. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea delineates marine sovereignty and is fundamental to fisheries governance. Coastal States have full sovereignty up to 12 nautical miles from their baseline, in the area known as territorial sea (arts. 2 and 3). States also have full sovereign rights enumerated in the Convention, which include managing and exploiting marine resources, up to 200 nautical miles from their baseline, in their exclusive economic zone (arts. 55–57). 51. Sovereign boundaries cut across the distribution of many species, creating shared stocks between States. Accordingly, States have a duty to coordinate and ensure the conservation and development of shared stocks (arts. 63, 64 and 118). These cooperative terms are detailed in the Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks and operationalized through intergovernmental regional fisheries management organizations or arrangements on a regional or species basis. There are still no accurate estimates of the number of exploited marine species shared by neighbouring States. Recent studies, however, show that catches from transboundary species – stocks that cross the exclusive economic zones of two or more bordering coastal States – are declining more than those from non-transboundary species. 60 This highlights that effective and equitable international, regional and subregional cooperation is more important than ever to protect sustainable small-scale fisheries.61 52. The Convention unfortunately conceptualizes the ocean as a natural resource to be exploited and managed, in which a State must enable as much extraction as possible. The Convention represents an attempt to temper an extractive prime directive by reconciling it with the need to replenish fish stocks and biodiversity. 53. Specifically, States must establish policies that determine a maximum sustainable yield, as qualified by relevant environmental and economic factors, including the economic needs of coastal fishing communities and the special requirements of developing States (art. 61 (3)). States are required to develop management schemes based on scientific evidence that ensure “proper conservation” and avoid overexploitation (art. 61 (2)). Concurrently, they are mandated to promote “optimal utilization” to achieve social and economic development goals (art. 62). There is no predetermined formula that guides States on how to calibrate between optimal socioeconomic utilization and proper conservation. If a State is unable to harvest the entire allowable catch within its exclusive economic zone, it must grant other States access to the surplus of allowable catch, subject to national conservation measures (art. 62 (2)). 54. States must ensure that living resources are not endangered by overexploitation and that harvested species’ populations are maintained or restored to levels that can produce their maximum sustainable yield (art. 61 (2) and (3)). Nevertheless, the Convention offers flexibility to harvest at rates either above or below that yield based on “relevant environmental and economic factors” (art. 61 (3)). Unfortunately, for decades, States have interpreted the Convention in a way that enabled overfishing, mostly by large-scale operations. Moreover, the metric of maximum sustainable yield measures fish population in a way that does not account for the specific biological conditions a population needs to reproduce and flourish, and at times has incentivized overfishing. 62 In sum, the Convention does not reflect the ocean as a source of life in its fullest sense, and communal, cultural and spiritual concerns are left out. 60 61 62 GE.23-26071 Juliano Palacios-Abrantes and others, “The transboundary nature of the world’s exploited marine species”, Scientific Reports, vol. 10 (2020). See also the Voluntary Guidelines, para. 10.8. Philip Larkin, “An epitaph for the concept of maximum sustained yield”, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, vol. 106, No. 1 (1977). 11