Bangladesh gets 19,467sq km Bay area

Bangladesh has been awarded 19,467 square kilometres out of 25,602 sq km disputed area in the Bay of Bengal. The 19,467 square kilometres of Bangladesh's territorial water had long been caught up in dispute with India. Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali disclosed contents of the verdict of The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on the maritime boundary delimitation dispute between Bangladesh and India at a press briefing on Tuesday afternoon. On Monday, the Netherland-based court sent two copies of its judgment to Dhaka and New Delhi about the delimitation of the Bangladesh-India sea boundary row. Eariler, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the Jatiya Sangsad (Parliament) on July 2 that the verdict would be delivered ‘within a week’ and she hoped the outcomes would be in Bangladesh’s way. The court had informed both Dhaka and New Delhi of the much-awaited judgment yesterday but an embargo restricted them from making it public before the passing of 24 hours. The Sheikh Hasina-led government of 2009-2014 went in for arbitration over the delimitation of sea boundary under the United Nations Convention on Law of Sea (UNCLOS) on October 8, 2009. The hearings ended in December last year when both sides argued their case before the PCA in the Netherlands capital. The argument focused on issues including the location of the land boundary terminus, the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone, and the continental shelf within and beyond 200 nautical miles. meanwhile, in 2012, an 21-member International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg issued a judgment rejecting 'equidistance' boundaries (as proposed by Myanmar in that case) and awarded Bangladesh a sizable share of the disputed waters in the eastern part of the Bay of Bengal, including the continental shelf beyond 200nm. according to a news agency.