Nation awaits announcement of sea verdict

The nation awaits the judgment on Bangladesh-India sea boundary issue. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the 10th 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 favour. The Netherlands-based Permanent Court of Arbitrations (PCA) sent two copies of its verdict to Dhaka and New Delhi about the delimitation of the Bangladesh and India maritime boundary on Monday. The outcome will be announced on Tuesday afternoon. Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali will release the Hague-based PCA's judgment at a press briefing around 2pm (Bangladesh Standard Time), the ministry has said. Dhaka received the copy of the judgment on Monday morning. The court has informed both parties of the much-awaited judgment but an embargo restricts them from making it public before the passing of 24 hours. The government of Bangladesh went in for arbitration over the delimitation of maritime 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 Hague. 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. State minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam told the JS in February that they were expecting to have control over nearly 25,000 square kilometres of maritime areas if the verdict was in Bangladesh’s favour. The spokesperson of India’s external affairs ministry, Syed Akbaruddin, said during his minister Sushma Swaraj’s Dhaka visit last month that both countries would act in accordance with the verdict since they went to the court ‘voluntarily’, according to a news agency.