On the 20th of April, NOVA Ocean held the second event celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Masters, a seminar about “New Technologies and the Law of the Sea”, featuring Daniele Mandrioli, Assistant Professor in International Law at the University of Milan, and Armando Rocha, Assistant Professor at Católica Lisbon School of Law. While the first seminar, held on the 9th of April, focused on EU policy, in particular the future European Ocean Act, this second one focused purely on the Law of the Sea and its relationship with new technologies.

  The topic of new technologies is particularly timely in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, characterised by flexibility, instability and unpredictability. This transformation inevitably extends to legal norms, where new technologies can contribute to the development of international law, while also playing a role in the erosion of established norms.

  Daniele Mandrioli shared his research on “State Jurisdiction at Sea and Technological Innovation”, introducing the idea that technological development systematically stimulates new forms of “territorial temptation” at sea. This, in turn, leads states to extend control in ways that resemble land-based sovereignty, even after the adoption of UNCLOS. Technological innovation thus becomes not only a regulatory challenge, but also a vector of geopolitical contestation at sea. Such dynamics become particularly evident in emerging cases such as autonomous vessels or artificial islands, which challenge traditional assumptions about jurisdiction and the legal unity of the vessel. While UNCLOS is usually considered the moment when territorialization of the law of the sea was frozen, there are still new technologies arising at sea, many of which were not envisaged by the Convention, which demonstrates that this trend of territorialization and artificial jurisdiction is still ongoing, despite not being effectively regulated by the existing legal framework.

  This perspective was further developed by Armando Rocha, who reminded us that UNCLOS has very few mentions of technology, with rules designed to be stable throughout the decades, functioning largely retrospectively, by relying on past technological realities to regulate present and future challenges. This creates a structural mismatch between existing legal frameworks and the technological realities they are now expected to govern. With this being said, practice might be sufficient to adjust and adapt these rules, by re-interpreting them and providing alternative titles of jurisdiction, thereby addressing some of the jurisdictional issues created by these technologies at sea.

  In this sense, the law of the sea appears less as a static legal order and more as an adaptive system continuously negotiated between technological development, state practice and legal interpretation. This leaves room for reflection: is UNCLOS still adequate for regulating these new technological realities, or are we witnessing the gradual emergence of practices that may eventually require more than mere interpretation exercises, perhaps even formal reform? While some argue that UNCLOS remains a robust framework capable of adaptation through interpretation, others question whether it can continue to function as the “constitution of the law of the sea” in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

  This can be connected to Bellinda Bartoluci’s comment in the first seminar, where she mentioned that sometimes the urge to reform everything in EU law of the sea leads us to overlook the strength of existing legal instruments, which can be interpreted in new ways to address emerging challenges, also keeping in mind that the future is often unpredictable and the present still needs to be properly regulated.

  The key issue, therefore, may not be whether UNCLOS will be replaced, but whether it can continue to absorb technological change without losing its coherence as the constitutional framework of the law of the sea. With this being said, the question remains whether we will soon witness a new attempt to (re)codify the law of the sea, or whether UNCLOS will remain the cornerstone of ocean governance for decades to come.

Read more about the 10th Anniversary celebratory events program