UK and Argentina clash over Falklands oil project as Hamburg tribunal starts

Résumé détaillé

Sea Lion project in the North Falkland basin threatens to deepen sovereignty disputeArgentina has told an international tribunal that Britain’s approval of oil drilling off the…

Sea Lion project in the North Falkland basin threatens to deepen sovereignty dispute

Argentina has told an international tribunal that Britain’s approval of oil drilling off the Falkland Islands has dramatically deepened a sovereignty dispute that led to war four decades ago.

At the start of an historic legal clash at the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Itlos), an Argentinian legal team argued that the oil project must be suspended.

Javier Oyarzábal, chief legal adviser to Argentina’s ministry of foreign affairs, said that the 3,400 inhabitants of the Falkland Islands, whose status as a British overseas territory is disputed by Buenos Aires, had no right to the resources around the south Atlantic archipelago.

Oyarzábal said: “[Argentina] respects the interests of the inhabitants of the islands and their way of life as enshrined in the Argentine constitution … What these British citizens do not have is a right to decide to which state the islands belong …

“These resources belong to the Argentine people. Some 46 million of them including the 1,247 inhabitants born on the islands whose interests will be duly taken into account.”

Oyarzábal said Argentina was ready to negotiate “all aspects of the question” of the Falkland Islands, which are known as the Malvinas in Argentina, “including the present aggravation of the dispute caused by the UK”.

He accused the UK of refusing to enter talks over the islands while pushing forward on the exploitation of its natural resources in a way that would entrench the status quo.

Oyarzábal claimed that the oil money from the drilling would “finance the very military base and presence that sustains the UK’s de facto control of the territory”.

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