On Thursday, Attorney-General Githu Muigai and his team tabled geographical and seismic data collected for the past seven years.
The submission, to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, is in a bid to prove that the current sea boundary with Somalia should stand.
“In preparing the submission, Kenya had to acquire bathymetric data in 2007 and seismic, magnetics and gravity data in 2008, in offshore areas appurtenant to Kenya,” the Attorney-General’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.
The presentation to the UN Commission in New York comes just a fortnight after Kenya challenged a case filed by Somalia to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as invalid.
The commission was created by the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea.
It usually considers data and other material submitted by coastal states concerning the establishment of the outer limits of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles (370km) and to make recommendations.
Though Somalia has already sued Kenya on the issue, Kenya argues it wants to know the area in which it will have rights to exploit resources in the sea.
DISCORD OVER RESOURCES
“Kenya stands to benefit from minerals and other non-living resources of the seabed and the subsoil together with living organisms belonging to the sedentary species,” the AG’s Office stated.
Usually, based on what a country presents, the commission’s recommendations are final and binding and Kenya may have to adjust to those recommendations.
Kenya already missed a deadline to reach an agreement with Somalia over territorial boundaries.
Usually, the commission asks countries sharing maritime boundaries to submit to it the orientations and limits of those borders.
Those agreements must set out exclusive economic zones, territorial seas and continental shelves.
Kenya argues that the current sea boundary with Somalia, which takes a perpendicular line to the land boundary into the sea should stand because the Tanzania-Kenya sea border takes the same shape.
But Somalia wants the boundary to extend diagonally to the south at Kiunga into the sea, and not eastwards as it is today.
Somalia went to the ICJ to demand that its boundary with Kenya be adjusted to give Mogadishu a huge chunk of it with significant oil deposits.
The area in contest is about 100,000km2 forming a triangle east of the Kenya coast.
Sources DAILY NATION