Maritime Delimitation and Expanding Categories of Relevant Circumstances

IN seeking to discuss the nature of the process of maritime delimitation, and the nature and function of relevant circumstances within it, one is presented with a host of difficulties. Not only is one faced with extremely nebulous concepts, but the manner in which they have been examined and developed is both confusing and, at times, apparently contradictory. The earliest of the cases which will be considered, the judgments of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the North Sea Cases' and of the Court of Arbitration in the Anglo-French case,2 established much of what became the ground rules for subsequent consideration of the subject. These decisions were, however, conducted within a frame of reference dominated by Article 6 of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf, which provides that: