The Lie: The navies act under valid UN Security Council Resolutions.

The Reality: The navies have according to international and Somali national law no right whatsoever to enter the 200nm territorial waters of Somalia. The UN Security Council Resolutions, to which repeatedly the navies refer, are explicitly stating that they would be only valid and applicable with the consent of the Somali Government, i.e. the Somali parliament, which never has been given, while a fictive letter of former Somali president Abdullahi Yusuf was never produced and a letter signed “on behalf of the Somali Government” by Mauretanian former UNSRSG Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah is legally nil and void.

The Lie: Somalia has no 200nm Somali Waters

The Reality: Since 1972 the international community had respected Somali Law No. 37, which similar to the legal provisions  in other recognized nation states like Benin, Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, El Salvador, Liberia and Peru, declared 200nm as the territorial waters with all the respective rights and duties.

Since 1989, when Somalia was one of the first 40 signatories who also endorsed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Somalia has – congruent to its territorial waters – an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of 200 nm, with all the rights and protection mechanisms the Common Law of the Sea provides to all coastal states. Somalia had declared and never given up these rights, but had to suffer from much illegal activity by foreign interests, which caused the African Union (AU / then the OAU) at the Pan-African Conference on Sustainable Integrated Coastal Management (PACSICOM, Maputo, 1998) to decry specifically the constant violation of the Somali rights in Somalia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and H.E. Ambassador (Egypt) Ahmed Hagag as Assistant Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) declared that everybody must respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia.

Since 2009 Somalia has also a Continental Shelf Zone of 350 nm, based on international law and Somalia’s claim documented and handed in by Somalia on 17 April 2009 to the UN and the International Seabed Authority before the deadline of 13 May 2009. The establishment of the outer limits of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles is the right of all coastal States under international law. MORE LIES READ…..

READ MORE… STATUS OF SEIZED VESSELS AND CREWS IN SOMALIA AND THE INDIAN OCEAN (ecoterra – 05. July 2010)