Delegates attending the meetings of the Council of International Seabed Authority (ISA) have rejected a proposal to restrict statements by observers to the end of meetings.
The ISA proposal introduced by the President of the ISA Council, Tomasz Abramowski of Poland, would have limited observers, such as nongovernmental organizations and scientists, to one intervention at the end of each working group.
The proposal was criticized by more than half a dozen government delegates at the meeting, according to persons attending the meeting, and was withdrawn.
The effort to limit participation came at the beginning of a 10-day meeting at which a major topic is the regulation of deep sea mining. The Oct. 31-Nov. 11 sessions are being held in Trinidad & Tobago, where the ISA is headquartered.
Opposition to the proposal came from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, the United States, Chile, New Zealand and Costa Rica, according to persons attending the meeting. The Netherlands stated that it is “crucial to have full participation from observers and we need to have modalities for efficient proceedings.”
After Chile pointed out that no states had supported the proposal, the President ruled that the normal procedures will apply.
The proposal also drew criticism from Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), which spoke against it on behalf of the Pew Charitable Trusts, The Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI), Greenpeace, Oceans North, The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and The Ocean Foundation.
“We believe that this proposal to exclude observers from making observations on specific regulations. would be inconsistent with the procedure adopted in the UN, and specifically in BBNJ, where civil society made short and structured interventions on each article – the equivalent of each regulation,” the DSCC statement said, referring to the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC5) on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ).
The ISA has been criticized before for restricting access to meetings and to the webcasts. See July 2022 article in Mongabay and two 2021 articles in Pass Blue (Part One and Part Two).
Secret Data, Tiny Islands and a Quest for Treasure on the Ocean Floor, published Aug. 29, 2022, in the New York Times stated, “One of the top rule-making bodies at the Seabed Authority, its legal and technical commission, is secretive, meeting behind closed doors, and some of its own members also work for mining contractors.”
