1 Territorial and Maritime Dispute Between Nicaragua and Honduras in the Caribbean Sea (Nicar. v. Hond.), para. 17 (emphasis omitted) (Int'l Ct. Justice Oct. 8,2007). The basic documents, decisions, pleadings, transcripts, press releases, and other materials for this case and others cited here are available on the Court's Web site, <http://www.icj-cij.org>.

With the exception of a short, partial delimitation within the Gulf of Fonseca, the parties' maritime boundary in the Pacific remains in dispute; that delimitation was not before the Court.

2 In addition to finding that Honduras was sovereign over Bobel, Savanna, Port Royal, and South Cays, the Court noted (para. 136) that

3 This translation of the Treaty appears in Arbitral Award Made by the King of Spain on 23 December 1906 ”(Hond. v. Nicar.), 1960 ICJ Rep. 192, 199 (Nov. 18)Google Scholar.

4 Quoting id. at 202.

5 Quoting id. at 199.

6 Id. at 216.

7 Id.

8 See Maritime Delimitation and Territorial Questions Between Qatar and Bahrain (Qatar v. Bahr.), 2001 ICJ Rep. 40, at 102 (Mar. 16) (reported by Glen Plant at 96 AJIL 198 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

9 Nicaragua sought to found the Court's jurisdiction on Article XXXI of the Pact of Bogotá and the parties' declarations under Article 36(2) of the Court's Statute (para. 1). Honduras did not contest jurisdiction on either the territorial or delimitation claims, and the Court did not address the question. Honduras also did not contest the admissibility of Nicaragua's island claim (para. 116).

10 The Court also found that the critical date for the purpose of assessing effectivités on the disputed islands was in 2001, when Nicaragua filed the memorial in which it first “expressly reserved ‘the sovereign rights appurtenant to all the islets and rocks claimed by Nicaragua in the disputed area'” (para. 129). This late critical date allowed the Court to consider many Honduran effectivith that would have been irrelevant if it had adopted Nicaragua's critical date of 1977.

11 Uti possidetis juris is the principle that the internal administrative boundaries of the pre-independence sovereign, in this case Spain, form the international boundaries of the several successor states, here including Nicaragua and Honduras. Effectivités are acts that demonstrate the exercise of authority over an area.

12 The Court reviewed evidence of effectivités in the categories of legislative and administrative control, application and enforcement of criminal and civil law, regulation of immigration, regulation of fisheries activities, naval patrols, oil concessions, and public works (paras. 176-208).

13 Quoting Legal Status of Eastern Greenland (Den. v. Nor.), 1933 PCIJ (ser. A/B) No. 53, at 46 (Apr. 5).

14 The Court acknowledged that the process of” [identifying the relevant coastal geography calls for the exercise of judgment in assessing the actual coastal geography” (para. 289). The Court considered whether the relevant coasts faced the disputed area, whether the relevant coasts were long enough to “account properly for the coastal configuration in the disputed area,” and whether the linear approximation of the relevant coasts would cut off significant portions of territory, thereby depriving them of effect on the delimitation (paras. 295-98).

15 Judge Koroma, in his separate opinion, and Judge ad hoc Gaja, in his declaration, both noted that in the area between the opposite-facing islands, Honduras was awarded a maritime area south of 14° 59.8' N that it did not claim. Such awards are unusual in maritime boundary delimitations.

16 The territories of Jamaica, to the northeast, and Colombia, to the southeast, are within 400 miles of Honduras and Nicaragua, which suggests potentially overlapping claims. During the proceedings, both Colombia and Jamaica requested and were granted copies of the pleadings and annexes (para. 9). Also, two bilateral maritime delimitations were previously concluded in the vicinity of this delimitation: the 1986 Colombia-Honduras maritime boundary and the 1993 Colombia-Jamaica joint-regime area.

17 Jamaica did not get as much consideration from the Court as Colombia. It should be noted that an endpoint located at the easternmost extreme of the Court's bisector line would be well within 200 miles of Jamaica.

18 The Court did provide a range within which this endpoint might ultimately be located: between 82° W and “200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured” (para. 319).

19 Land and Maritime Boundary Between Cameroon and Nigeria (Cameroon v. Nig.; Eq. Guinea intervening), 2002 ICJ Rep. 303, para. 288 (Oct. 10) (reported by Peter H. F. Bekker at 97 AJIL 387 (2003)); see also Continental Shelf (Libya/Malta), 1985 ICJ Rep. 13 (June 3); Maritime Delimitation in the Area Between Greenland and Jan Mayen (Den. v. Nor.), 1993 ICJ Rep. 38 (June 14); Maritime Delimitation and Territorial Questions Between Qatar and Bahrain (Qatar v. Bahr.), 2001 ICJ Rep. 40 (Mar. 16). Other maritime boundary tribunals have followed this same approach. See Delimitation of the Continental Shelf (UK/Fr.), 18 R.I.A.A. 3 (1977), 18ILM 397 (1979); Maritime Delimitation, Phase II (Eri./Yemen) (Arb. Trib. Dec. 17,1999), at <http://www.pca-cpa.org>, 40 ILM 900 (2001) (reported by W. Michael Reisman at 94 AJIL 721 (2000)); Award, Jurisdiction and Merits (Barb./Trin. & Tobago) (UN Law of the Sea Annex VII Arb. Trib. Apr. 11,2006), at <http://www.pca-cpa.org>, 45 ILM 800 (2006) (reported by Barbara Kwiatkowska at 101 AJIL 149 (2006)); Award, Jurisdiction and Merits (Guy./Surin.) (UN Law of the Sea Annex VII Arb. Trib. Sept. 17, 2007), at <http://www.pca-cpa.org> (reported by Stephen Fietta in this issue of the Journal).

20 See Continental Shelf (Tunis./Libya), 1982 ICJ Rep. 18 (Feb. 24); Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary in the Gulf of Maine Area (Can./U.S.), 1984 ICJ Rep. 246 (Jan. 20).

21 It could be argued that the Court's resort to the angle bisector method was not such a large step. After all, an angle bisector is essentially a simplified equidistance line, or an equidistance line drawn using simplified coasts. Both are distance-based methods grounded in coastal geography. The Court itself mentions that the bisector method provides, in certain circumstances, an “approximation” of the equidistance method (para. 287).

22 In a delimitation award rendered only weeks before the instant judgment, the tribunal in the Guyana/Suriname arbitration, see supra note 19, rejected the use of the angle bisector method in that particular situation.

23 See, e.g., Maritime Delimitation and Territorial Questions Between Qatar and Bahrain; Maritime Delimination, Phase II (Eri./Yemen).

24 The Court hints that the islands received this treatment because “as regards the islands in dispute no claim has been made by either Party for maritime areas other than the territorial sea” (para. 262).

25 On December 13, 2007, the Court ruled on Colombia's preliminary objections, see Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicar. v. Colom.), Preliminary Objections, para. 12, finding that it had jurisdiction to rule on the maritime delimitation and on the sovereignty dispute over all features except the islands of Providencia, San Andres, and Santa Catalina.