Kingston, Jamaica

On 24 and 25 July, the United Nations Legal Counsel, Mr. Miguel de Serpa Soares, visited Kingston, Jamaica.

The main purpose of Mr. Serpa Soares’s visit to Kingston was to participate in the events commemorating the 25th anniversary of the entry into force of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the establishment of the International Seabed Authority, alongside Heads of State and Government, ministers, former Secretary-Generals of the Authority, delegations and United Nations officials and observers.

In his intervention the Legal Counsel highlighted that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, as the constitution for the oceans, matched a very complex substantive regime with an articulate and innovative institutional mechanism - the Authority - representing a unique achievement in the history of multilateral negotiations.

Mr. Serpa Soares commended the diligent and inspiring work carried out by the Authority in the past 25 years in the implementation of this innovative regime and congratulated the Authority on the progress it had made under the successive leaderships of Ambassador Satya Nanda, Mr. Nii Odunton and now Mr. Michael Lodge.

Following the ceremony, a high-level panel on strengthening capacity-building opportunities and initiatives for developing States was held. Chaired by the President of Nauru, H.E. Mr. Baron Waqa, the panel was comprised of Mr. Jens Frolich Holte, (Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kingdom of Norway), H.E. Carlos Den Hartog (Permanent Representative of Brazil to ISA), Mrs. Rena Lee (Ambassador for Oceans and Law of the Sea Issues, Special Envoy of the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore), Mrs. Sonali Samarasinghe (Minister, Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the UN), and H.E. Satyendra Prasad (Permanent Representative of Fiji to the UN).

The official commemoration of ISA’s 25th anniversary was opened by the Prime Minister of Jamaica, H.E. Mr. Andrew Holness, with statements by the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and Secretary-General for the UN Oceans Conference, Mr. Liu Zhenmin and the President of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, Judge Jin-Hyun Paik, amongst others.

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