The future of shipwreck exploration may be determined by a series of meetings at UNESCO in Paris, the first of which was held this past July. Prior to this meeting, I was named one of the United States’ delegates to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) expert meeting to consider the "Draft Convention for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage." The purpose of this "expert meeting" was to evaluate the new Convention being proposed, which would create strict rules governing access to historical shipwrecks in all the world’s waters. For the purposes of the Convention, anything underwater which is a hundred years or older, and was created by man would be considered Underwater Cultural Heritage.

Some initiative to protect historically significant shipwrecks is overdue, but the first draft of this Convention went farther than would be considered acceptable to the legitimate shipwreck explorers and salvors of the world. It would also appear to alienate certain rights of a long list of other groups, including fishermen, sport divers, insurance companies and maritime lawyers.

There were three principal problems with this draft. The first, and most contentious issue at the UNESCO meeting, was the Convention’s conflicts with the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty. This treaty took over ten years to negotiate and is a complicated document which outlines the rights and obligations of signatory countries over their territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, and even international waters.

The problem is that the new Draft Convention sought to create new areas of jurisdiction through which countries could take control of historic shipwrecks. These jurisdictional extensions had significant conflicts with specific articles in the Law of the Sea Treaty.

The second problem, and the most critical area from the standpoint of commercial shipwreck explorers, was potential restrictions on commercial access to shipwrecks by adoption of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) "Charter on the Protection and Management of Underwater Cultural Heritage". The ICOMOS Charter delineates very strict guidelines for how shipwrecks should be treated.

As strict as they are, however, most of these guidelines serve as a model framework for the excavation and scientific investigation of shipwrecks, which should be adopted by the shipwreck exploration community. One item in the ICOMOS Charter which seems counterproductive to promoting ethical commercial access to shipwrecks is the last sentence of Article 13, which reads, "Underwater Cultural Heritage is not to be traded as items of commercial value". Several countries, including the United States, Great Britain and the Philippines, specifically voiced concern about this concept.

I heartily endorse handing over artifacts that fall under the heading of "Underwater Cultural Heritage" to the country of cultural origin (when it can be determined), especially when the explorer is rewarded appropriately. We suggest that it is reasonable for compensation to come from ownership of a different class of artifact, those which we call "Trade Goods". These would include coins, bullion, raw gems and other artifacts characterized by large numbers of duplicate items. These items must still be carefully excavated using sound archaeological fieldwork, and conserved and documented carefully. However, after the knowledge that can be gleaned from them is saved and made available to the academic and scientific world, we feel comfortable that sale of these pieces in no way hampers the archaeological record.

The third important concern raised at the UNESCO meeting was whether warships should be treated as underwater cultural heritage. Countries have traditionally held that they have the right of "Sovereign Immunity" over warships. As such, these ships do not fall under the Law of Salvage, and are protected from access by anyone except the flag country. Under the proposed UNESCO Charter, all warships were exempted from protection. Many countries had a problem with this, because they felt that when a warship was in their territorial waters or contiguous zone, it was a part of that country’s cultural heritage, even though it may have flown a different flag hundreds of years previously.

Colombia, and many other Latin American and Caribbean countries expressed great concern about this issue, arguing that most of the historically significant shipwrecks in their waters were actually former warships of the Spanish, Dutch, English and Portuguese empires.

What is the next step for this Draft Convention? At this meeting, the assembly didn’t even finish going through all the articles, the preamble, or the ICOMOS charter, so there is a long way to go in even preliminary consideration. The best guess of experts that are experienced observers in the UNESCO forum, is that it will be another 4 to 5 years before a Convention is agreed upon. After that, it can take many years for countries to actually sign on to the agreement.

The next expert meeting is now scheduled for mid-April of 1999 in Paris. Those of you that wish to find more information about this initiative, may visit our website at www.shipwreck.net, or E-mail me