Dr Ntovas participates in high-profile academic conference on the law of the sea and marine environment in Norway

The IML Director, Dr Alexandros X.M. Ntovas, Associate Professor of Maritime Law, Southampton Law School participated in the annual conference hosted by the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea (NCLOS) on 23-24 November 2022 in Tromsø, Norway.

The Conference brought together established scholars and post-doctoral and doctoral researchers from across the world to share research and provide a forum for in-depth and inspiring discussions on the Conference theme OCEAN SPACE. Ocean spaces and ecosystems are often connected in complex and multiscale ways and resist fixed legal delineations. UNCLOS by contrast, divides ocean space into different maritime zones thus fragmenting the ocean environment and subsuming each fragment to a different legal regime. Additionally, phenomena such as climate change and land-based marine pollution challenge the legal separation between land and sea. Marine and terrestrial ecosystems remain thus legally disjointed disregarding complex interdependencies. And while the preamble of UNCLOS does recognize that “the problems of ocean space are closely interrelated and need to be considered as a whole”, it arguably remains essentially sectoral in approach. The speakers approached the conference theme from a broad perspective, and delivered presentations and contribute to panel discussions on the following themes: 1) Ocean space and climate change; 2) Transcending borders: Ecosystem-based [and integrated] ocean governance; 3) Spatiality and law across sectors; 4) Ocean space, dynamism and law; and 5) Conceptualizing ocean space.

Dr Ntovas sat on the second panel, ‘Transcending borders: Ecosystem-based [and integrated] ocean governance’, and his presentation was titled: ‘What is in the name of … Commons? On the legal language and ecological semantics of straddling fish stocks and highly migratory species: Moving the discourse toward a ‘transjurisdictional’ conception’.