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Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law [MPEPIL]

Innocent Passage

Kari Hakapää

From: Oxford Public International Law (http://opil.ouplaw.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved.date: 03 October 2024

Subject(s):
Security assistance — Innocent passage — Territorial sea — UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) — Coastal states

Published under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law under the direction of Professor Anne Peters (2021–) and Professor Rüdiger Wolfrum (2004–2020). 

1 It is long recognized that States exercise authority over coastal waters that are effectively controlled from land. Such a conception seems already to have been part of Grotius’ argument on the freedom of the seas. In the early 18th century, Bynkershoek submitted a more specific division of sea areas: the high seas where freedom of the seas was to prevail and a coastal belt of sea subject to the coastal State’s sovereignty. 2 The original theory of the territorial sea regarded it as the ‘property’ of the coastal State: territorial sea was assimilated with...
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