Commonwealth view of deep sea mining

Following the resumed Tenth Session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) the UNCLOS President, Tommy T.B. Koh, declared in a press statement that: ‘The programme of work just adopted by the Conference, spelt out its collective determination that — with or without the United States — delegates intended to bring the Conference to a successful conclusion next spring, and that unlike previous occasions we do not intend to let the commitment slip away from our fingers’.1