Who resolves Arctic oil disputes?

"The international community has dealt with lots of maritime boundary issues with a lot of resources at stake," says Ted McDorman, professor of law at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. "When you have an overlapping claim, you negotiate with one another. The Arctic won't be any different." The Inuit have been living in the High Arctic for thousands of years, and 160,000 still do. Over the past 400 years, their land was incorporated into European empires, which claimed control of the sea to a distance of three miles. The rest of the vast Arctic basin wasn't owned by anybody.

Such claims are legitimate under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which lets states make claims beyond 200 nautical miles if the seabed is shown to be an extension of their continental shelf. All the potential claimants except the US have ratified the convention.

The convention has time limits for making claims, based on when they ratified the treaty. Russia, which did so early, submitted a claim to the North Pole and 1.2 million square kilometers of seabed in 2001, alleging that the underwater Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of its continental shelf. Canada and Denmark have until 2013 and 2014, respectively, to submit counterclaims. The US will have 10 years to claim a large area adjacent to the Alaskan shelf once it ratifies the treaty.

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Claims beyond 200 nautical miles are reviewed by a group of 21 scientists who sit on the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a body created by the Law of the Sea Convention. "The commission will be facing very, very significant workload issues in the next while because many countries will be turning in claims," says Donald Rothwell of the Australian National University in Canberra. "An already lengthy process could take longer."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0820/p01s02-woeu.html?page=1