It doesn't meet the 8 criteria that define an independent country. These are
* Has space or territory which has internationally recognized boundaries (boundary disputes are OK).
* Has people who live there on an ongoing basis.
* Has economic activity and an organized economy. A country regulates foreign and domestic trade and issues money.
* Has the power of social engineering, such as education.
* Has a transportation system for moving goods and people.
* Has a government which provides public services and police power.
* Has sovereignty. No other State should have power over the country's territory.
* Has external recognition. A country has been "voted into the club" by other countries.
failing to meet 6 of the 8 outright and only qualifiedly meeting the other 2.
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Which are the characteristics it fails?
ReplyDeleteHi! Thanks for your comment. I posted this over 9 years ago, so I honestly don't remember.... I need to go refresh my memory :) The geography site I link to in the post says, "There are currently 196 independent countries or States around the world. Territories of countries or individual parts of a country are not countries in their own right.
DeleteExamples of entities that are not countries include: Hong Kong, Bermuda, Greenland, Puerto Rico, and most notably the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. (Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England are not countries.)"
Elsewhere on that site it lists the 8 and evaluates Sealand in light of them, giving #4 a "perhaps" and #6 a "yes" but judging all the others as "no". http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a/sealand.htm
Wikipedia has this to say about its legal status: Legal status
The claim that Sealand is an independent sovereign state is based on an interpretation of a 1968 decision of an English court, in which it was held that Roughs Tower was in international waters and thus outside the jurisdiction of the domestic courts.
In international law, the most common schools of thought for the creation of statehood are the constitutive and declaratory theories of state creation. The constitutive theory is the standard nineteenth-century model of statehood, and the declaratory theory was developed in the twentieth century to address shortcomings of the constitutive theory. In the constitutive theory, a state exists exclusively via recognition by other states. The theory splits on whether this recognition requires 'diplomatic recognition' or merely 'recognition of existence'. No other state grants Sealand official recognition, but it has been argued by Bates that negotiations carried out by Germany following a brief hostage incident constituted 'recognition of existence' (and, since the German government reportedly sent an ambassador to the tower, diplomatic recognition). In the declaratory theory of statehood, an entity becomes a state as soon as it meets the minimal criteria for statehood. Therefore, recognition by other states is purely 'declaratory'.
In 1987, the UK extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles (6 to 22 km). Sealand now sits inside British waters. The United Kingdom is one of 165 parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (in force since 1994), which states in Part V, Article 60, that: 'Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf'.[9] In the opinion of law academic John Gibson, there is little chance that Sealand would be recognised as a nation because it is a man-made structure.
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