The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

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The framework convention for ocean governance, adopted in 1982 and in force from 1994, which carries the modern law on submarine cables in a small group of articles. It affirms the freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines on the high seas and on the continental shelf, subject to conditions; it requires every state to make it a punishable offence for ships or persons under its jurisdiction to break or injure a cable beneath the high seas wilfully or through culpable negligence — Article 113 — and it extends that to conduct calculated or likely to cause such damage, which is a strengthening of the 1884 formula; and it provides for indemnity where a vessel sacrifices gear to avoid damaging a cable. What it does not do is as important. It gives no protection regime for cables inside a coastal state's territorial sea beyond that state's own law; it provides no mechanism for the rapid authorisation of repairs; and enforcement depends entirely on the flag state or on a state that can establish jurisdiction, which in practice has meant that most cable damage has never been prosecuted anywhere. The prosecutions of the mid-2020s in Finland and Taiwan are notable precisely because they are exceptions.

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