NEW YORK, NY – [ANA-MPA] [Photo: GANP/ Dimitris Panagos]
International law could not be applied selectively and rules governing the seas could not be rewritten to serve the ambitions of individual states, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stressed, speaking at a high-level debate of the Greek Presidency of the UN Security Council titled “Maintenance of international peace and security: Emerging technologies and maritime security”.
Referring to the so-called Turkish-Libyan memorandum on the delimitation of maritime zones, he described it as a flagrant violation of fundamental principles of the International Law of the Sea, adding that it was illegal, arbitrary, and directly contradicted geography itself.
Mitsotakis recalled that Greece and Libya were natural maritime neighbours with opposite coasts and had the right, under international law, to delimit their maritime zones through agreement.
By contrast, he pointed out that Turkiye and Libya did not have opposite or adjacent coasts, yet had attempted to establish an artificial maritime border between them, calling the move absurd and noting that there was no precedent for such a diagonal delimitation.
Mitsotakis noted that the two countries had attempted to draw a maritime border between themselves as if the Greek islands situated between their coasts did not exist, adding that those were not uninhabited rocks in the middle of the sea, but thriving communities with centuries of history and dynamic economies, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people.
The prime minister stressed that geography could not be rewritten and that sovereign rights could not be erased by drawing arbitrary lines on a map.
