Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol, 1991)

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. Signed at Madrid on 4 October 1991 and in force from January 1998, it designates Antarctica a natural reserve devoted to peace and science and prohibits any activity relating to mineral resources other than scientific research. It replaced a different answer: a convention regulating Antarctic mineral resource activity had been negotiated through the 1980s and was abandoned when Australia and France declined to sign it, so the prohibition exists because a regulatory scheme failed rather than because one was never attempted. The prohibition has no expiry, but the Protocol provides that after fifty years from entry into force any consultative party may call a review conference - which puts a date around 2048 in every discussion of Antarctic minerals, usually described inaccurately as the year the ban lapses. It does not lapse; it becomes possible to convene a conference about it, and modifying the mining prohibition would additionally require a binding legal regime to be in force.
3. Knowledge
4. The Antarctic Treaty (1959)
5. Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol, 1991)
6. Connections
7. The Antarctic Treaty (1959)
8. The Madrid Protocol prohibits Antarctic mining
9. The Madrid Protocol becomes open to a review conference
10. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
11. The International Geophysical Year puts twelve nations on the ice at once
12. Antarctica
13. Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol, 1991)
14. The Svalbard Treaty (1920)
15. McMurdo Station
16. The Antarctic Treaty is signed at Washington
17. The Antarctic Treaty enters into force
18. The Madrid Protocol prohibits Antarctic mining
19. Evidence
20. The Protocol designates Antarctica a natural reserve devoted to peace and science and prohibits any activity relating to mineral resources other than scientific research; it provides that a review conference may be requested after fifty years from entry into force, which is the provision commonly and wrongly reported as an expiry of the mining ban in 2048. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: as above - no source was opened during production. Article numbering is deliberately not quoted in this record because it was not checked.