China Says Trump’s Order on Seabed Mining Violates International Law

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday that a president of the executive order that Trump signed a day before to accelerate the process of permits for the mining of marine beds in international waters “violates international law and damages the general interests of the international community.”

The BBC previously reported the comments of a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Guo Jiakun. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

With the remarkable exception of the United States, almost all countries in the world are part of a treaty on marine and maritime activities that entered into force in 1994, called the Convention of the Law of the Sea. That the United States has never ratified that the treaty is partly what allowed Mr. Trump to decide unilaterally that the Government could issue permits to extract the seabed in areas beyond the US territorial jurisdiction.

The White House has argued that extracting critical minerals such as cobalt and nickel from the nodules at the bottom of the ocean is crucial for its supply of metals that enter a large amount or advanced technologies. On Friday, the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration, the agency that will have the task of issuing marine bed mining permits, said the Trump administration had unlocked “the next gold fever.”

Country dishes have requested a moratorium in the mining of seabed, and even those, such as China, who have been eager to see that seabed mining takes place, have given rise to the international authority of the seabed, an agency created under Gethy, agrees in the deep sea.

Many scientists see deep water mining as environmentally risky. Never before has it been done on a commercial scale, and the deep sea is one of the less understood ecosystems on the planet.

Many countries rebuked the embrace of the Trump administration of the mining of sea beds several weeks ago, when a Canadian mining team, the metal company, announced that its US subsidiary should be directly to the US government. UU. For a permission for Dep-Stepse mining.

The environmental groups expressed their outrage in the executive order.

“Trump is trying to open one of the most fragile and less understanding ecosystems of the earth to reckless industrial exploitation,” said Emily Jeffers, main lawyer of the Center for Biological Diversity. “The deep ocean belongs to all and protecting it is the global duty of humanity. The environment of the sea bottom is not a platform for” first extraction of the United States. “

Companies have been exploring the seabed for minerals for more than a decade. The richest area they have found in the Eastern Pacific, in an area called Clarion-Clipperton area, which occupies a fixed section under the ocean between Mexico and Hawaii.

The Commerce Department would handle permission in the Clarion-Clipperton area, through NOAA, which has been beaten by large-scale cuts to its financing and workforce since Trump taught in a position.

“NOAA provides Americans with accessible and precise climate forecasts; hurricanes and tsunamis traces; it responds to oil spills; keep seafood on the table; and much more,” said Jeff Watters in the group without Fofited Ocean Ocean Ocean Ocean. “Forcing the agency to carry out deep water mining permits, while these essential services are cut only for the ocean and our country.”