Venezuela\u27s Contribution to the Contemporary Law of the Sea

Two discernible instances, separated by a generation and thirty years, affirm Venezuela\u27s major contributions to a long and patient universal legislative process in which custom and convention have alternated with one another to consolidate and emerging public order of the sea: surface, waters, bottom and subsoil. Two main issues, therefore, will be briefly dealt with in this Article. The first concerns the earliest treaty ever concluded between two States to delimit, explore and exploit a submerged area, namely, the Anglo-Venezuelan Gulf of Paria Treaty of 1942; the second brings to a focus the Venezuelan concept of the patrimonial sea, a compromise proposal introduced in the United Nations Sea-Bed Committee de lege ferenda as an official thesis in 1971. Obviously, a Brief Survey of the Developments in the Law of the Sea considered relevant to the subject matter, during the thirty-year time gap, could not be comfortably omitted