The Barcelona System: An overview

Deupmann, Peter

The Barcelona System: An overview

Master Thesis

2014-07-30

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Institute of Marine and Environmental Law

Faculty

Faculty of Law

Abstract

In this paper, the Barcelona Convention and its related protocols, together known as the Barcelona System, will be analysed. The Barcelona System is designed to protect and preserve the marine environment of the Mediterranean Sea. It is astonishing that the Convention, which was adopted as early as 1976, has inspired only few lawyers to write about it. Not even the extensive amendment procedure of 1995 and the subsequent adoption of new protocols lead to the whirl of comments, otherwise common in our field. As a result, the Barcelona System is the domain of only a handful of lawyers, of whom Professor Scovazzi of the University of Milan is probably the most well-known. Besides the limited amount of articles, there is a huge amount of internet publications in the form of workshop reports, brain-storm sessions, exhortations, considerations, news paper articles and expressions of concern. The latter range is interesting to get an impression of the fields of current interest, but have only limited value for juridical purposes. The overall picture of (juridical) sources is thus rather pale. For this reason, I put the various protocols in their context and analysed them after briefly mentioning their global and regional counterparts, with which I compared them. However, the comparison is not always very detailed, since the aim is to show the weaknesses and strengths of the protocols and not those of the other instruments. Besides that, it was not my intention to elaborate extensively on comparison because the primary purpose of the paper is to give an - if you wish critical- overview of the Barcelona System, since this, as far as I know, does not exist. The interested lawyer, who wants to know more about the Barcelona System can therefore only do one thing: read the Convention and protocols, of which the present paper is the result. To provide the necessary juridical background, I begin with the various maritime zones of Mediterranean interest. The case, as you shall see, is that the Mediterranean States have been reluctant to claim much more than a territorial sea of 12 nautical miles. However, some States have recently begun to establish different types of zones beyond the 12 nautical mile limit. This is a point of huge interest and of major importance regarding the enforcement powers of the coastal States in an area that used to be high seas.

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