The status of dependent outlying archipelagos in international law

The creation of a legal framework governing archipelagic states has been an important innovation of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) Part IV of this Convention confers upon such states the right to draw archipelagic baselines joining the outermost points of their archipelagos and to exercise sovereignty over the enclosed waters. However, the LOSC grants this right only to 'archipelagic states', which are defined as states 'constituted wholly by one or more archipelagos'. Dependent outlying archipelagos may not benefit from the application of this special protective regime since they do not fall within the purview of the Convention's definition of archipelagic states. Thus, the question of the legal regime applicable to dependent outlying archipelagos arises