Somali stability motivates Norway

by Mr Heikki Eidsvoll Holmås
Wednesday, May 22, 2013

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Sir, Katrina Manson (“Oil thrown on the fire” and “A tangle of converging foreign interests”, Analysis, May 14) rightly focused on the complex challenges facing Somalia. We can all agree that a race for oil resources by foreign oil companies and destabilising rivalries between regional administrations must be avoided. The premature awarding of concessions could trigger the latter.

So let’s be clear. Efforts to secure peace, stability and prosperity for future Somali generations are what motivate Norway, not future prospects for oil companies. But several active disinformation campaigns have tried to curtail current efforts by the Somali authorities and the international community.

Some of the viewpoints expressed in the aforementioned article lack any basis in reality. Norway has assisted Somalia, and many other countries, with the clarification of their continental shelf rights. All parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea face a 10-year deadline to document the outer limits of the continental shelf if claims are made beyond the automatic entitlement to 200 nautical miles.

With Norway’s help, the Somali transitional government managed to submit preliminary information to the international Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in New York in 2009. This ensured full Somali rights to submit complete documentation at a later stage, without risking any alleged loss of rights before the commission. At this junction, Somalia made it crystal clear to the international community, through the secretary-general of the United Nations, that the continental shelf boundary with Kenya had not been settled and was still pending. The so-called “agreement to sign away the triangle to Kenya”, referred to in the article, does not exist.

On the contrary, Somalia and Kenya jointly confirmed an understanding that guaranteed that the consideration of geological data in the disputed area by the commission would not and could not, in any way, prejudice the future drawing of boundaries between the parties. Not issuing such an understanding would, in fact, have prevented the commission from considering any Somali data relating to the disputed area.

Heikki Eidsvoll Holmås, Minister of International Development, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oslo, Norway.

This article was originally published in the Financial Times

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