Lawyer says Britain wrong to believe in historic doctrine that Crown has sovereignty over parts of oceans
Britain should not be permitted to act as a 17th-century colonial power treating the waters around the Falkland Islands as a Dominium maris Britannici, Argentina has told an international tribunal.
Marcelo Kohen, representing Argentina at a hearing in Hamburg, mocked Britain for apparently believing in the historic doctrine that the British crown has sovereignty over expansive parts of the oceans.
Argentina has applied to the international tribunal for the law of the sea (Itlos) for a ruling that would force Britain to suspend the drilling for oil in the North Basin of the Falkland Islands ahead of further arbitration.
The Sea Lion oilfield is about 130 miles north of the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory over which Argentina has a longstanding sovereignty claim.
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, reportedly shared among his cabinet a photograph of the Argentinian legal team in Hamburg, describing it as “tremendous”, adding that “we are working on the Falklands issue like no one else in history”.
Addressing the tribunal on the second day of hearings, Kohen said that the dispute over the archipelago of 700 islands in the south Atlantic – known in Argentina as the Malvinas – did not mean that the area was a “legal black…
