Current Legal Developments International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea

摘要

Provisional measures aim to preserve the respective rights of the disputing parties pending the final decision of a court in order to ensure effectiveness of its judgment. It may be argued that provisional measures are a common feature in national and international judicial procedures, and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (hereafter the ITLOS or the Tribunal) is no exception.1 In fact, the prescription of provisional measures occupies an important part of the ITLOS jurisprudence. To date, six out of eighteen cases submitted to the ITLOS involved a request for the prescription of provisional measures.2 The M/V Louisa case (Case No. 18) between Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Spain, which will be succinctly examined in this contribution, is the sixth case involving the request for provisional measures.3