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Accountability And The Commission On The Limits Of The Continental Shelf: Deciding Who Owns The Ocean Floor, Anna Cavnar

Anna Cavnar

Over the past decade, scholars and government officials have become increasingly concerned that the world is building an international institutional infrastructure that is unaccountable to the states and individuals it supposedly serves. This Article takes the question of accountability to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (the "Commission" or "CLCS"), the international body charged with overseeing delineation of the outer continental shelf – a process which will eventually give more than sixty countries exclusive control over millions of square kilometers of seabed and the resources, including potentially vast oil and gas deposits, found within it. The United …