Colombia raps ‘exorbitant’ Nicaragua demands in sea dispute

Colombia accused Nicaragua on Tuesday of making the most extreme demands in legal history as the UN’s top court dealt with their decade-long row over a swathe of the Caribbean.

The Latin American rivals are fighting at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over a 2012 ruling that gave Nicaragua a stretch of oil and fish-rich sea extending 200 nautical miles (230 miles, 370 kilometres) from its coastline.

Nicaragua, in Central America, has now asked the ICJ to more precisely set out the limit of its sea borders — which Colombia, in South America, says encroach on its own.

“Nicaragua’s claim is unprecedented in the history of judicial dispute settlement,” Colombia’s representative Eduardo Valencia-Ospina told the Hague-based court on a second day of hearings.

“Nicaragua belongs to the minuscule and exclusive club of states that believe that extended continental shelves can encroach upon the 200 nautical miles entitlements of other states.”

He said other neighbouring states had also protested Nicaragua’s “exorbitant claim.”

The ICJ ordered the Colombian navy earlier this year to stop interfering in Nicaraguan waters.

On the first day of hearings on Monday, Nicaragua accused Colombia of threatening the “public order of the ocean”.

There are no land borders between Nicaragua and Colombia, but diplomatic relations have been strained for almost a century over disputed maritime limits.

Nicaragua finally took Colombia to the court in 2001, and in 2012 it won several thousand square kilometres of territory in the Caribbean that had previously been Colombian.

A furious Colombia, which was left with only seven islets, said at the time it would no longer recognise the court’s jurisdiction on border disputes.

Nicaragua then went back to the court in 2013 alleging that Colombia had carried out violations of the judgment.