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State Department
Hides
Maritime Boundary Agreement
From Senate and House of Representatives
The State Department
conducted the negotiations over the maritime boundary agreement
with the Soviet
Union/Russia in complete secrecy from the American public, from the State of
Alaska, and from Congress. The negotiations started in January 1977 and
continued until June
1990. There may have been sessions since 1990
regarding Russian demands for additional seabeds
and fishing rights.
To this date, everything about the negotiations continues to be highly
classified
materials in the State Department's files--even the names of the
negotiators, the dates and places of
the negotiations, and the records of the
presentations by both sides.
It's failure to inform Congress went beyond secrecy. It was illegal.
The Senate has the
constitutional authority for advice and consent for all treaties. The "advice"
phase
means that the Senate has the power to be advised upon any negotiations that my
result in a
treaty and to provide advice as to the contents. The Senate was
not given any written notification
about the negotiations, nor was it allowed to
provide any written advice whatsoever about the
content prior to the public
announcement in June 1990 that a U.S.-U.S.S.R. Maritime Boundary
Agreement had
been signed by Secretary of State James A. Baker III as a prospective treaty.
As for the Senate and
House of Representatives, in their capacities of oversight for foreign
policy,
the problem of secrecy by the State Department has been severe for all types of
international agreements. The State Department never gave the Senate or
the House of Representatives any
written notifications of the negotiations over
the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Maritime Boundary Agreement,
either the treaty form or the
executive agreement form prior to their signing in June 1990. To
address
this State Department problem for non-treaty agreements, the Case-Zablocki Act
had
been passed in 1972
provided the following:
1 USC Code Section 112b United States international agreements; transmission to Congress
(a) The
Secretary of State shall transmit to the Congress the text of any international
agreement
(including the text of any oral international agreement, which
agreement shall be reduced to writing),
other than a treaty, to which the United
States is a party as soon as practicable after such agreement
has entered into
force with respect to the United States but in no event later than sixty days
thereafter. However, any such agreement the immediate public disclosure of
which would, in the opinion of the President, be prejudicial to the national
security of the United States shall not be so transmitted to
Congress but shall
be transmitted to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate and the
Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives under an
appropriate injunction of
secrecy to be removed only upon due notice from the
President. Any department or agency of
the United States Government which
enters into any international agreement on behalf of the
United States shall
transmit to the Department of State the text of such agreement not later than
twenty days after such agreement has been signed.
(b) Not later than March 1,
1979, and at yearly intervals thereafter, the President shall, under
his own
signature, transmit to the Speaker of the House and the chairman of the
Committee on
Foreign Relations of the Senate a report with respect to each
international agreement which,
during the preceding year, was transmitted to the
Congress after the expiration of the 60-day
period referred to in the first
sentence of subsection (a), describing fully and completely the
reasons for the
late transmittal.