The Honorable Senator Lugar:
10 W. Market Street Room 1180
Indianapolis, In. 46204

Dear Sir:

It has been brought to my attention that, in the course of your Senatorial duties as the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee you have elected to bring the Law of the Sea Treaty back to a vote in the Senate. I would like to point out a few objections to that treaty.

1. The treaty would deny non-discriminatory access and make it extremely difficult for American and other developed countries to participate in deep seabed mining.

2. We, the United States, would have ambiguous rights of freedom of navigation in exclusive economic zones and submerged transit through straits. The difficulty of establishing our legal right to exclusive economic zones navigation and submerged straits passage would be far more difficult under the convoluted text of the treaty. (I have the text.)

3. We lose substantially on the issue of deep seabed mining and are far better off with a no-treaty notion for continental shelf resource exploitation, scientific research, and fisheries purposes.

4. To suggest the treaty provisions on navigation are worth trading away for a preferred position on other issues is nonsense–there is simply no value for navigation in the treaty to trade away.

5. The compulsory dispute settlement feature of the treaty may signal future problems. See Article 36 of the ICJ where the Senate added the words “as determined by the United States” to allow the United States to determine whether a question was within its own jurisdiction and beyond the jurisdiction of the World Court.

6. Under the “International Seabed Authority” we would lose the ability to acquire underwater intelligence from our array of acoustic surveillance devices currently in place.

7. The “pollution of the marine environment” clause will allow U. N. incursion into our internal waterways, via our estuaries, in search of sources of substances introduced into the marine environment which results or is likely to result in harm to living resources.

8. In assigning to the U.N. the ability to tax any type seagoing vessel, the United Nations can either hire member nations to enforce these regulations or maintain its own enforcement force paid for by this vast new stream of independent funding.

Therefore, in light of these arguments against the ratification of this treaty I must ask that you reject the treaty, as Senator Jesse Helms did in 1994, and do not submit it to the full Senate for ratification. We are not subordinate to any international body.

Sincerely

Ed Sparks