In the current context where news abounds about important geopolitical changes such as the United States' pretension to seize the large island of Greenland, key to controlling the maritime routes in the area, or news related to our archipelago, such as the existence of important natural resources in its maritime environment, or the content of the book “Canarias Vendida”, by the lawyer Alejandro Guerra, which we had the opportunity to present last week with great public success, and whose main thread is that Morocco has launched a plan to seize our islands using current international law, we are going to make a series of reflections on the importance of International Maritime Law for our archipelago.
This branch of law constitutes an essential element for understanding the strategic, economic, and geopolitical reality of the Canary Islands.
As an archipelago located in the mid-Atlantic, in addition to constituting a maritime space dotted with eight islands (the territory of an archipelago is as much the islands that compose it as the sea that unites them), we have a large maritime space, whose delimitation, regulation, and exploitation are fundamental for its present and future development. In fact, at this very moment, the extension of our continental shelf to the west up to 350 miles is being discussed at the United Nations, a key issue for the control of important natural resources that inhabit, so to speak, the depths of our seabed.
These maritime spaces are crucial for issues such as the sustainable exploitation of inferred resources, the protection of the marine environment (key for the islands' main economic driver, tourism), maritime security, trade routes, and international cooperation with Atlantic rim countries.
Likewise, the sea constitutes today a scenario where important security challenges converge, such as the management of irregular migratory flows, controlled, for the most part, by authentic organized mafias that take advantage of the desperation of many people in search of better living conditions, and the use of Atlantic routes for international drug trafficking.
In this context, the Law of the Sea should not be considered an abstract or merely academic subject, located in the obscurity of classrooms or in the rigidity of scientific publications, but rather an essential legal instrument to guarantee security, stability, and adequate management of our strategic interests linked to the sea.
Understanding its importance is, therefore, vital to analyze the role of the Canary Islands in the international arena and its projection in the Atlantic space.
