EN
The demarcation of ocean areas requires a consideration of a whole range of legal provisions. But there also exist many aspects of an extra-legal nature which have a substantive effect on the ultimate course of ocean borders. Demarcation has not lost its contemporary importance either from a legal or from a political point of view - for example, in the case of the Snake Island dispute between Ukraine and Romania, the dispute over the Spratly and Paracel islands, and the dispute between Japan and Russia about the Kuril Islands. The authoress of the article predicts that in the immediate future we must count on a growth in the importance of the demarcation issue. She is a proponent of the most commonly applied method in international law of settling disputes of this kind - that is the principle of equidistance. In accordance with the UN Convention (10 December 1982), she thinks that when one is dividing up the territory of a shelf area or of economic zones, it is vital to come to an appropriate solution of the dispute.