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November 2007

Issue: 2007 - 9

Nica - Newsletter

Country and Tourism News

• UN Draws Honduras, Nicaragua Sea Border

Country and Tourism News

UN Draws Honduras, Nicaragua Sea Border

By MIKE CORDER – 9 October 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The U.N.'s highest court Monday granted Honduras sovereignty over four Caribbean islands in its decades-old dispute with Nicaragua, and carved up rich fishing grounds and offshore exploration concessions for oil and gas.

The two Latin American neighbors said the new maritime boundary drawn by the International Court of Justice will remove a source of tension between them that in the past has led to the seizures of fishing boats by both sides.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya welcomed the decision. "The importance of our borders is vital as is Honduras' relations with its neighbors," Zelaya said in a televised address from Tegucigalpa. "No one will break the unity of Central America again."

He then headed to the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, where he was to meet Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at the town of Las Manos, 125 miles southeast of the Honduran capital.

"There we will hug each other like brothers so we can celebrate the court's ruling," he said.

Nicaragua's ambassador to the Netherlands agreed the decision was a landmark for the region. "This problem between our two countries is finished," said Carlos Arguello. "There is no more reason to be raising nationalism or anything between our two countries."

The decision by the 17-judge court is binding and without appeal.

Both countries found elements to like in the judgment: Honduras got the islands, while Nicaragua could argue that the court gave it more than it asked for.

The ruling demarcated a line roughly midway between the two countries' rival claims. Honduras said the boundary should be drawn along the 15th parallel while Nicaragua wanted it to run northeast from the coast.

The line deviates to the south where it is disrupted by the territorial waters of the islands awarded to Honduras.

The court set the border "substantially north of the 15th parallel that Honduras wanted as a limit, so Nicaragua in that respect has gained substantial territory," Arguello said.

Drawing the border was complicated because it had to start at the constantly shifting mouth of the Coco River, which forms the land border.

To get around the problem, the judges started the new border at a point three miles off the coast and told both countries to agree on a line linking that point with a boundary marker on land set in the 1960s.

Nicaragua filed the case in 1999, saying international law gave it the right to "explore and exploit" natural resources, including possible oil reserves and fish stocks within a zone 200 miles from its coast.

Honduras claimed that a ruling by the Spanish king in 1906 set a boundary projecting eastward along the 15th parallel from the mouth of the Coco River.

But the court rejected that argument. "The 1906 award does not deal with the maritime delimitation and it does not confirm a maritime boundary," said the court's president, Rosalyn Higgins.

Instead, the judges agreed with Nicaragua's claim that up until Monday's ruling, there had never been a maritime border.

Nicaragua's lawyers had argued that the 15th parallel boundary was intended to give most of the sea to Honduras. They also said that Honduras only dredged up the 1906 ruling when relations between the two countries soured during the 1979-90 Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

Nicaragua based its claim for a line heading northeast on the shape of the coast around the Coco River.

The court can issue binding rulings in such border disputes. It is then up to both countries to effectively and quickly implement the ruling.

Associated Press writer Freddy Cuevas in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, contributed to this report.

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