This book records the proceedings of a Soviet-American workshop held in Moscow between 28 November and 2 December 1988. Three principal subject areas are covered: legal issues of navigation, straddling stocks and marine scientific research. Some general issues pervade all of the discussions, the prospects for, and impact of, the entry into force of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention being the most significant.

The first general topic, navigation issues, receives the most extensive treatment and is the subject of 15 formal contributions, nine comments and an extensive general discussion. Many of the formal contributions are, however, very brief and, in the main, generalist overviews, a notable exception to this pattern being the substantial section on “Military Exclusion and Warning Zones on the High Seas” by Jon Van Dyke, which has been extensively updated, incorporating developments to the end of 1989, and has already been published elsewhere. Yet the generally rather rambling approach of this section makes it difficult for a reader to glean much from any of the pieces in isolation. If the entire section is read, however, a number of issues clearly emerge, the most interesting, and possibly most important, of which concerns the scope of the regime of Innocent Passage.

Both Soviet and American delegates agreed that warships enjoy the right of Innocent Passage through the territorial sea. Agreement on this was easy enough. The gloves finally came off, however, when several of the Soviet contributors sought to distinguish innocent “passage” from innocent “navigation”, and stressed the need for the innocence of passage to be considered in the light of the legitimacy of its underlying purpose, thereby alluding to the dispute between the USSR and United States over passage in the Black Sea. A Soviet contributor maintained that innocent passage in the Black Sea was impossible since, unless it had authorization to enter a port, there was nowhere for a vessel to go except out again (p. 172). This brought the rather stinging response that “the continuing coastal state orientation in Soviet legislation regarding innocent passage in the territorial sea is really the vestige of an old school of thought that some narrow sectors now stubbornly attempt to retain” (p. 195). Ouch!