Territorial Sea
A state's territorial sea extends up to 12 nautical miles from its baseline. If this would overlap with another state's territorial sea, the border is taken as the median point between the states' baselines, unless the states in question agree otherwise. A state can also choose to claim a smaller territorial sea.
Conflicts still occur whenever a coastal nation claims an entire gulf as its territorial waters while other nations only recognize the more restrictive definitions of the UN convention. Two recent conflicts occurred in the Gulf of Sidra where Libya has claimed the entire gulf as its territorial waters and the U.S. has twice enforced freedom of navigation rights, in the 1981 and 1989 Gulf of Sidra incidents.
Read more about this topic: Territorial Waters
Famous quotes containing the words territorial and/or sea:
“All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings from other people’s wash.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)