I was supposed to take between five and seven minutes. Hopefully, I can take a few more minutes than that. I have seven points here, which you're supposed to have in front of you. I will simply enumerate those points. Also, I will suggest to you what I could spend a few more minutes on.
The first point is the meaning of what I call key terms. The second is about sovereignty over the islands. Well, I'll cover that in thirty seconds. The third is about Canada's rights, which we call sovereign rights, over the continental shelf in the Arctic basin. The fourth is Canada's sovereignty, and I emphasize sovereignty, over the waters of the Canadian Arctic archipelago. Number five is the legal status of what we call the Northwest Passage, which has six or seven different routes. In number six, I suggest a few measures to prevent what I call the internationalization of the Northwest Passage. Number seven is Canada's cooperation with the other Arctic states. Those are the seven points, which you're supposed to have in front of you, as well as sub-points on each of the seven.
Now, you might wonder why the key terms. Well, I can tell you that this convention, the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, after all, took some 12 years of negotiation to arrive at this text, so that nearly every word has a very special meaning; certainly a good number of them have. It's quite important for us to get our vocabulary straight before we have any kind of discussion. I repeat this, because sometimes I've heard it said that those are guidelines. They're not guidelines. This is a legally binding treaty among the 155 parties to the convention. As I said, it was adopted in 1982 after some 14 years, and then it did not come into force until 1994. You can understand just from that how important this text is.
Now, on the meaning of key terms, I have six terms here, which I do believe are most important, even though this is not the energy committee. It's the national defence committee, and of course you're mainly concerned, I would presume, about naval navigational rights and that sort of thing. Nevertheless, I do believe you must be interested in the definition of those terms.
The first term is sovereignty. Everybody talks about sovereignty. Sometimes, I'm afraid they do so inappropriately. Sovereignty can be very simply defined. We're talking about territorial sovereignty. Political sovereignty is presumed. Territorial sovereignty can be simply defined as the totality, the whole bundle, of state jurisdiction. That is the jurisdiction that a state may exercise within its territorial boundaries. It applies horizontally, but it also applies vertically. It's usque ad caelum et ad infernos, subject of course to the rights of aircraft passage as provided in treaties and conventions.
The second term is internal waters, not to be confused with territorial waters. Internal waters are the waters landward of the baselines from which you draw your territorial waters. And those internal waters landward of the baselines include--and this is important in the case of Canada--the waters that have been enclosed by straight baselines across various indentations in the coast or along a coastal archipelago. That's the case for Canada, as I mentioned a moment ago.
Then you have territorial waters. Territorial waters are seaward of the baselines, and now it's generally accepted and provided for in the convention to be 12 miles. Of course, you have sovereignty, but subject to--and this is important for naval people--the right of innocent passage of foreign ships. But subject to that right, the coastal state has sovereignty over the territorial waters of 12 miles.
The fourth term, exclusive economic zone, is new since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Before that, you had the high seas immediately beyond territorial waters. Now you have an exclusive economic zone of 200 miles. Those 200 nautical miles are measured from the baselines, and the coastal state does not have sovereignty at all over those. The freedom of navigation applies in principle, as on the high seas. However--and this is where the continental shelf comes in--the coastal state has sovereign rights, not sovereignty, exclusive rights over the resources of the continental shelf, both the water resources and those of the continental shelf. We will say a few words about that later. Beyond the 200 miles you have the high seas, complete freedom of navigation, of course, and all the other freedoms of the high seas.
The last key word I have put on this list, which you don't have, is continental shelf. The continental shelf is the continuation of the land territory under the sea. You have, as a coastal state, at least 200 miles, but you can have more than that. If it is established that it is the same geology, it is therefore the continuation of the land mass under the sea, and it can go quite a bit further. We will say a word about that later. I'm talking about the seaward limit.
Those are the key terms.
Number two on my outline is sovereignty over the islands. There is no question whatever about Canada's sovereignty over the Arctic Islands. On only two occasions in history has Canada's sovereignty been questioned. The first was in 1920, when Denmark espoused the point of view of its explorer, Rasmussen, who said that Denmark's Eskimos, as they were then called in Greenland and everywhere, can go across and shoot muskoxen on Ellesmere Island; it's no-man's land. Great Britain, who was looking after Canada's foreign affairs at the time, sent a note to Denmark and that was the end of that. There was never any question after that.
The second time, when there was a little bit more serious question, was in 1928, with respect to the Sverdrup Islands, west of Ellesmere. Sverdrup, a Norwegian explorer, had spent some three or four years exploring three huge islands. This one was more serious. Norway could very well have claimed those islands on the basis of its nationals' explorations and the spending of quite a bit of money. However, in 1928....
I'm sorry. I drove some 400 miles yesterday, and I don't know how I got a cold.