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East Timor-Australia Maritime Boundary Treaty – Indonesia Next?
Australia
and Indonesia’s neighbour, East Timor, have just signed a new maritime boundary
agreement which sets the Timor Sea boundary on the median line between the two
countries, giving East Timor sovereignty over a much larger share of the
Greater Sunrise oil and gas field than Australia’s preferred option of a maritime
seabed border on the edge of Australia’s continental shelf, a mere 50 nautical
miles from East Timor’s coast.
However, following the 1997 Australia-Indonesia Maritime Delimitation
Treaty, Australia considers that with Indonesia, unlike East Timor, it has two maritime borders:
- a seabed
border situated on the edge of Australia’s continental shelf which means that
all the resources found on the seabed within this area belong to Australia, and - a median
line maritime border which determines ownership of the resources in the sea
itself.
Since Indonesia
never ratified the 1997 treaty, and now that East Timor has succeeded in
negotiating a single median line boundary, commentators wonder if Indonesia
will not wish to re-open negotiations to obtain a single median line border and
the oil and gas revenues that would go with it.
Information provided by Budd Indonesia
budd.indonesia@budd-pni.com