Balancing Navigational Rights of Ships and Maritime Security of Coastal States: The Case of Designating Archipelagic Sea Lanes of Indonesia and the Philippines


40 years after the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos), the regime related to the navigation of ships in archipelagic waters has remained underdeveloped. It is due to the paucity of practices of archipelagic states establishing archipelagic sea lanes (asl s) as well as adopting national laws and regulations concerning such passage.
In the Southeast Asian region, Indonesia and the Philippines are the two archipelagic states, and they actively contributed in the development of the archipelagic regime during the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Nonetheless, they have not fully designated a system of asl s. This situation led to several contentious incidents at sea, particularly related to the passage of warships in archipelagic waters, between the two countries and other user states.
This article will analyse the practices of Indonesia and the Philippines in establishing asl s and their concomitant consequences. Particularly, it focuses on the attempt to harmonize the domestic legal systems of these two countries with international rules and regulations prescribed in unclos, and their subsequent practices at the International Maritime Organization (imo). This article is a reflection of the archipelagic states regime of unclos after 40 years of adoption.