The UN’s top court dismissed Nicaragua’s claims against Colombia Thursday in a decades-long Latin American legal battle over an oil- and fish-rich swathe of the Caribbean Sea.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said it “rejects” Nicaragua’s bid to improve an earlier 2012 ruling that gave it a large chunk of the Caribbean, while awarding seven small islands to Colombia.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro hailed the “victory” in the latest instalment of a legal saga that has dragged out at the Hague-based court since 2001.
“Great victory for Colombia in The Hague,” tweeted Petro, Colombia’s first-ever leftist president. “The ICJ did not agree to Nicaragua’s claims to expand its continental shelf.
“We hope with this ruling to close the border dispute and focus on bringing sustainable development to our archipelago.”
Nicaragua, in Central America, went back to the Hague-based ICJ in 2013 to argue that its territory should extend beyond the 200 nautical miles (230 miles, 370 kilometres) from its coastline that is customary under international law.
Seeking to extend what it won in 2012, Nicaragua claimed its territory should instead follow the continental shelf that extends under the sea from its coastline.
Colombia disputed that, saying it overlaps with the area in which the archipelago of islands is located.
ICJ chief judge Joan Donoghue said the court, by a majority, “rejects the request made by the Republic of Nicaragua” to move the lines of its territory “beyond the boundary determined by the court” in 2012.
‘Exorbitant demands’
Nicaragua said it would “obey” the ruling as it has done before.
“My only and basic comment is that the court has spoken and Nicaragua has always listened and obeyed,” its representative at the ICJ, Carlos Arguello Gomez, told journalists at the court.
“That is exactly what’s happening now and that’s what’s going to happen.”
The dispute has raised military tensions, with the ICJ in a related case ordering the Colombian navy in 2022 to stop interfering in Nicaraguan waters.
“In this dispute, maritime areas rich in biodiversity, fishing resources, scenic beauty, but also natural resources such as hydrocarbons are at stake,” Nicolas Boeglin, professor of public international law at the University of Costa Rica, told AFP.
Nicaragua and Colombia share no land borders but diplomatic relations have been strained for almost a century over disputed maritime limits.
Nicaragua finally took Colombia to the court in 2001, and in 2012 it won several thousand square kilometres of territory in the Caribbean that had previously been Colombian.
A furious Colombia, which was left with only seven islets, said at the time it would no longer recognise the court’s jurisdiction on border disputes.
Nicaragua then went back to the court in 2013 alleging that Colombia had carried out violations of the judgment.
The International Court of Justice was set up after World War II to rule in disputes between UN member states. Its judgments are final and cannot be appealed.
A number of Latin American states including Chile and Bolivia, Guyana and Venezuela, and Guatemala and Belize have asked the ICJ in recent years to resolve decades- or in some cases centuries-old territorial claims.
