The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Monday that the islands of MBANIE, CONGA and Cocoteros, away from the coast of Gabon, legally relate to the equatorial guinea, which settle a dispute for a decades between West African neighbors.
Three small islands, which are effectively uninhabited, but are located in potential oil and gas-rich water, have been controlled by Gabon as its troops had forcibly evicted the equatorial guilty soldiers from MBANIE in 1972.
What is the claim of Gabon?
In 2003, Gabon argued that an unknown unknown treaty of 1974, known as the Bata Convention, confirmed his deadly on the states.
Honorary Chairman of the Constitutional Court of Gabon, Mary-Madeline Amborntsuo claimed that the Bata Convention “solves all the session issues about the delimitation of the islands and the border.”
Is Equatorial Guinea claimed?
But Equatorial Guinea has always rubbed the argument, demanding the original copy of the treaty what the gabon has not been made to produce.
“Nobody had seen or heard about this alleged conference,” Domingo MBA Assono, vice -president of the mines and hydrocarbon, told the ICJ judges in the Hague.
“In addition, the document presented was not at the origin, but only what was on informal photocopy,” he said.
Philip Sands, a lawyer representing Equatorial Guinea, dismissed the Bata Convention as a “scrap of paper”, telling the world court: “You are being asked to rule that an state can rely on the photocopy of an alleged document, which cannot be found for the original and no one has been given for any Reliance.”
What rules did ICJ do?
And, on Monday, the court agreed, ruled that the Bata conference could not be seen as a treaty with the force of the law.
Instead, it ordered Gabon to accept a Treaty signed in Paris in 1900, which divided the French and Spanish colonial assets in the region, handing over the islands to Spain, with a sovereign to the Equatorial Guinea on his freedom in 1968.
“The title that has the strength of law worries about sovereignty on islands so far … the title hero by the state of Spain is the hero [until] October 12, 1968, in which Equatorial Guinea Republic informed, “The court concluded.
“Sadly, none of the two sides can find the original documents,” Gabon’s Amborantsuo said, referring to the Bata Convention. “Archives were badly managed due to many things; adverse climate, lack of trained personnel and lack of technology.”
As a result of the controversy, which is held in a cordial manner and diplomatic between the two neighbors, the Gaboni soldiers must carry their base on Mbanie – which is barely a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) long.
