Ümit Enginsoy ANKARA- Hürriyet Daily News
Under the law of the sea, an exclusive economic zone is a seazone over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine resources, including production of energy from water and wind.
Generally, a state’s exclusive economic zone extends 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) out from its coastal baseline. Usually, any point within an overlapping area belongs to the nearest state.
Modern developments in the last century led to the international recognition of the 200-mile exclusive economic zone by the Third United Nations Convention on the law of the Sea in 1982. Part V, Article 55 of the Convention says: Specific legal regime of the exclusive economic zone: The exclusive economic zone is an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea, subject to the specific legal regime established in this Part, under which the rights and jurisdiction of the coastal state and the rights and freedoms of other states are governed by the relevant provisions of this Convention.
There is an ongoing dispute between Turkey and Greece over the extent of the continental shelf and exclusive economic zone each country can claim. Turkey has not signed the U.N. convention on the law of the sea. But at the end of 1986 it declared an exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea and concluded an agreement with the Soviet Union about states with coasts opposite or adjacent to the coasts of Turkey, using the method of the median line. Later Turkey etched agreements with Bulgaria and Romania, which were similar to the one it concluded with the Soviet Union.
Greek Cyprus ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea in December 1988. Like Turkey, Israel is not a party to the convention. Some well-known examples of exclusive economic zone disputes included the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland. Those were a series of confrontations in the 1950s and 1970s between the two countries over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
Also Norway and Russia dispute both territorial sea and exclusive economic zone with regard to the Spitsbergen archipelago. An agreement was reached in principle in April 2010 between the two states that promises to resolve this boundary dispute. The South China Sea is the site of an ongoing dispute between several neighboring nations.
(Source: www.hurriyetdailynews.com )