Georgetown- De Ware Tijd, Suriname's national news, is reporting that President Desi Bouterse wants a friendly settlement to the claim over the New River Triangle area in the Berbice River. Bouterse said that the National Assembly in Suriname will be pursuing actions, based on international laws, to explore the possibility of the issue. Suriname expects the issue over the disputed land will feature for discussion during a future parliamentary sitting. Suriname’s action on June 3, 2000 in interrupting the oil rig CE Thornton effectively prevented any further exploratory work in that maritime area – by anyone. It certainly set back Guyana’s economic development. If that action was left as the determinant of the status quo, there would have been irreparable damage to Guyana’s development. Moreover, left unchallenged, it undermined the purposes of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to which both Guyana and Suriname (and more of the world’s countries) are signatories. The Tribunal has found that the expulsion of the CGX oil rig by Suriname on June 3, 2002, “constituted a threat of the use of force in breach of the Convention (on the Law of the Sea), the UN Charter and general international law.” The Tribunal’s Award has confirmed the rule of law in CARICOM’s maritime areas.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea establishes that, in its Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf as delimited under the Convention, Guyana has “sovereign rights’ of exploration and exploitation of the sea bed and sub-soil of the Zone and of the waters above them. The Exclusive Economic Zone runs outwards from Guyana’s territorial sea up to a distance of 200 miles and is bounded on the lateral side with Suriname by the maritime boundary that the tribunal has established Guyana’s sovereign rights to explore and exploit the hydrocarbon resources within the boundaries of the Exclusive Economic Zone and the Continental Shelf, once contested by Suriname,and now settled on the basis of the Tribunal’s Award. All this comes less than 2 weeks after Venezuela renewed their claims of western essequibo encompassing the very area where the the Exxon mobil oil exploration is operational.
This move to reopen the claim by Venezuela to the area west of the Essequibo River had actually recommenced in 1949 following the publication of a memorandum written by Severo Mallet-Prevost, a lawyer in the team that conducted the Venezuelan case before the arbitral tribunal in 1899. The memorandum written in 1944 claimed that the award which settled the boundary between Venezuela and Guyana in 1899 was a result of a "political deal" between Great Britain and Russia. A Russian judge was the chairman of the five-member arbitral tribunal.
In February 1962, when the United Nations Fourth Committee was discussing the issue of independence for British Guiana, Venezuela, basing its case on the Mallet Prevost memorandum, officially made its contention through a memorandum presented to the Secretary General of the United Nations. The memorandum alleged that the Arbitral Award of 1899 was invalid, and put forward the claim that the region west of the Essequibo River was Venezuelan territory. While Venezuela did not object to the forthcoming independence of Guyana, it objected to the western Essequibo being included as Guyanese territory.
In reply to the Venezuelan contention, Sir Patrick Dean, a special British representative to the UN, on 19 September 1962, took the position that the border dispute had been settled by the 1899 Award, and that the question could not be reopened on the posthumous word of an aged lawyer who had nursed grievances against the Tribunal for the whole of his life. In his lengthy address to the Special Political Committee of the UN, Dean repudiated all Venezuelan claims to Guyanese territory.
The border issue was further discussed at another meeting of the UN Special Committee on the 12 November 1962. At that meeting, Dr. Marcos Falcon Briceno, Minister of External Relations of Venezuela, said that his country was not asking the UN to pass judgement on the substance of his country's claim, and that he was merely putting on record the reasons why Venezuela could not recognise the 1899 Award as valid.
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