THE ROMANIA V. UKRAINE DECISION AND ITS EFFECT ON EAST ASIAN MARITIME DELIMITATIONS

I. INTRODUCTION The 2009 case Maritime Delimitation in the Black Sea ( Romania v. Ukraine ) 1 presented the International Court of Justice (ICJ) with an opportunity to define and give meaning to the ambiguous and disputed phrase in Article 121(3): "[r]ocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own." 2 The Court declined to provide a definitive definition for these words in its opinion, but by determining that Ukraine's tiny Serpents' Island should have no impact whatsoever on the maritime boundary, the Court reconfirmed that small uninhabited islands will generally have limited or no impacts on delimitations and that such features should not generate extended maritime zones. 3 Serpents' Island (also called Snake Island and Ostrov Zmeinyy) is virtually the only island in the Black Sea, except for a few that hug the coasts. It has 0.17 square kilometers of land area (forty-two acres or seventeen hectares) and is thirty-five kilometers (about twenty nautical miles) east of the Danube Delta (also called Dragon's Beard), 4 which forms the border between Ukraine and Romania. It lacks freshwater resources and has never been inhabited historically, although it has had a lighthouse on it since the 1800s and recently Ukraine has built structures and a pier on it, apparently to strengthen its claim to the ocean space around it. Its name is said to have come from the snakes that lived in a temple built on the islet in ancient times. The ocean space around ...