State Territory Constitution, acquisition, loss

Stand on Marine Drive and look at the sea. Land has been reclaimed at Nariman Point, the Coastal Road has pushed the shoreline outward, and a few kilometres out a foreign tanker is sailing past. Whose is the reclaimed strip, whose is the water under the tanker, and how did India come to own any of it? International law answers by asking what a State's territory consists of and how it is gained or lost. This topic takes the answer in three steps: what territory is, how a State acquires it, and how it can slip away.

In two minutes

State territory is the land, internal waters, territorial sea, subsoil and airspace over which a State exercises sovereignty; it is gained by occupation, cession, prescription, accretion or adjudication, it can no longer be gained by conquest, and it is lost by the mirror-image events.

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