A Treaty in Trouble

For the past seven years, diplomats from 154 countries have been negotiating the so-called Law of the Sea Treaty, a constitution for the world's oceans. As delegates arrived at U.N. headquarters in New York last week to put what they hoped would be finishing touches on the agreement, the Reagan Administration abruptly announced that it wanted to review the treaty. Then the White House, with no warning, fired acting Chief Negotiator George Aldrich, along with eight members of the bipartisan U.S. delegation.

The Administration claimed that it merely wanted to put its own representatives onto the delegation and that it needed more time to study the treaty. Indeed the agreement's provisions are numerous and complicated: guarantees for freedom of passage on the high seas, recognition of the twelve-mile territorial limit and 200-mile "exclusive economic zone" for coastal nations, safeguards against pollution and, perhaps most important, establishment of an international body to govern the mining of seabed mineral resources. Yet some U.N. observers note that the Reaganauts, are deeply suspicious of both the U.N., which they feel is dominated by anti-U.S. elements, and of Elliot Richardson, the liberal Republican who led the first U.S. Law of the Sea delegation and has been a major force in shaping the agreement.

The treaty's seabed provisions call for a complicated system in which profits would be split between mining companies and developing nations. Some U.S. firms feel they should not have to divide revenues derived from international waters with other countries, and are especially disturbed by a clause that requires them to share technology with Third World nations.

Richardson, who is still a member of the U.S. delegation, counters that all but 14 of the 130 changes that have been made in the seabed mining provision since mid-1977 are favorable to the U.S. Without the treaty, he contends, a mining company would never be able to acquire the legal right to mine a part of the sea bottom. Says Richardson: "It is really a choice between the best possible regime we could negotiate vs. the legal uncertainties that would exist in the absence of a treaty."

The Reagan Administration's unexpected delay has created ill will in the U.N. As one Western ambassador puts it, "The world cannot stand still forever waiting on Washington." Some participants fear that the U.S. refusal to sign the treaty may tempt Third World countries to reopen issues in which they made concessions. It is now hoped that a "final" session might be scheduled by summer. After that would come the substantial hurdle of U.S. Senate approval.

South Dakota's Larry Pressler, chairman of the subcommittee that would review the treaty, warned Reagan last month that it would have "great difficulty" passing in the Senate in its present form.

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