A condominium (plural either condominia, as in Latin, or condominiums) in international law is a political territory (state or border area) in or over which multiple sovereign powers formally agree to share equal dominium (in the sense of sovereignty) and exercise their rights jointly, without dividing it into "national" zones.
Although a condominium has always been recognized as a theoretical possibility, condominia have been rare in practice. A major problem, and the reason so few have existed, is the difficulty of ensuring co-operation between the sovereign powers; once the understanding fails, the status is likely to become untenable.
The word is recorded in English since 1718, from Modern Latin, apparently coined in Germany c. 1700 from Latin con- 'together' + dominium 'right of ownership' (compare domain). A condominium of three sovereign powers is sometimes called a tripartite condominium or tridominium.
This section needs additional citations for verification .(April 2010) |
Condominium | Sovereign states responsible | Area (Km2) | Population | Date created | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Abyei Area | Sudan South Sudan | 10,546 | 124,390 | 9 January 2005 | The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the Second Sudanese Civil War, created the special status administrative area which is considered to simultaneously be part of West Kordofan state and Northern Bahr el Ghazal state. Following the independence of South Sudan in 2011, the area effectively became a condominium between the Republic of South Sudan and the Republic of the Sudan. |
Antarctica | Argentina Australia Austria Belarus Belgium Brazil Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Czechia Denmark Ecuador Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Guatemala Hungary Iceland India Italy Japan Kazakhstan Malaysia Monaco Mongolia Netherlands New Zealand North Korea Norway Pakistan Papua New Guinea Peru Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Slovakia Slovenia South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom United States Uruguay Venezuela | 14,200,000 | 1,300 - 5,100 (seasonal) | 1 December 1959 | Antarctica is a de facto continental condominium, governed by the 29 parties to the Antarctic Treaty that have consulting status. Only 7 of these parties have territorial claims |
Brčko District | Bosnia and Herzegovina: | 493 | 83,516 | 8 March 2000 | Subnational condominium of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina created due to its multiethnic nature. [1] |
Gulf of Fonseca | El Salvador Honduras Nicaragua | 3,200 | 0 | May 24, 1980 [2] | El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua exercise a tripartite condominium over parts of the Gulf of Fonseca and of the territorial sea outside its mouth. [3] [4] [5] |
Joint Regime Area | Colombia Jamaica | 0 | November 1993 | As an alternative to delimiting their sea boundary, Colombia and Jamaica share a maritime condominium called the Joint Regime Area in the Caribbean Sea by mutual agreement. The outer portion of the EEZ of each country otherwise would overlap in this area. Unlike other "joint development zones", this condominium appears not to have been purposed simply as a way to divide oil, fisheries or other resources. | |
Koalou | Benin Burkina Faso | 68 | ~5,000 | March 2008 | The area is administrated jointly by the "Joint Committee for the Concerted Management of the Kourou/Koalou Area" (COMGEC-K). Neither nation expresses sovereignty over the area, with a permanent solution still pending. [6] |
Lake Constance | Austria Germany Switzerland | 536 | 0 | No official treaty | Austria and Germany consider themselves to hold a tripartite condominium with Switzerland (albeit on different grounds) over the main part of Lake Constance (without its islands). On the other hand, Switzerland holds the view that the border runs through the middle of the lake. [7] [8] Hence, no international treaty establishes where the borders of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, in or around Lake Constance, lie. [8] |
Moselle | Germany Luxembourg | 0 | 1816 | The Moselle and its tributaries, the Sauer and the Our, constitute a condominium between Germany and Luxembourg, which also includes bridges, about 15 river islands of varying size, [9] and the tip of one island, Staustufe Apach, [10] near Schengen (the rest of the island is in France). | |
MOU 74 Box | Australia Indonesia | 50,000 | 0 | 1974 | Officially known as the Australia–Indonesia Memorandum of Understanding, the MOU Box was established by a bilateral agreement regarding the Operations of Indonesian Traditional Fishermen in Areas of the Australian Fishing Zone and Continental Shelf – 1974. The agreement recognizes access rights of traditional Indonesian fishers from Rote Ndao Regency in shared waters to the north of Australia with regard to the long history of traditional Indonesian fishing there, especially for trepang, trochus, abalone and sponges. The MOU Box includes the Scott and Seringapatam Reefs, Browse Island, and Ashmore and Cartier Islands. [11] |
Pheasant Island | France Spain | 0.00682 | 0 | 1659 | Pheasant Island is an island of the Bidassoa. Established as part of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, It is formally administered by Spain between 1 February and 31 July each year (181 or 182 days) and by France between 1 August and 31 January each year (184 days). [12] |
Under French law, Andorra was once considered to be a French–Spanish condominium, although it is more commonly classed as a co-principality, since it is itself a sovereign state, not a possession of one or more foreign powers. However, the position of head of state is shared ex officio by two foreigners, one of whom is the President of France, currently Emmanuel Macron, and the other the Bishop of Urgell in Spain, currently Joan Enric Vives i Sicília. [13]
A protectorate, in the context of international relations, is a state that is under protection by another state for defence against aggression and other violations of law. It is a dependent territory that enjoys autonomy over most of its internal affairs, while still recognizing the suzerainty of a more powerful sovereign state without being a possession. In exchange, the protectorate usually accepts specified obligations depending on the terms of their arrangement. Usually protectorates are established de jure by a treaty. Under certain conditions—as with Egypt under British rule (1882–1914)—a state can also be labelled as a de facto protectorate or a veiled protectorate.
New Hebrides, officially the New Hebrides Condominium and named after the Hebrides Scottish archipelago, was the colonial name for the island group in the South Pacific Ocean that is now Vanuatu. Native people had inhabited the islands for three thousand years before the first Europeans arrived in 1606 from a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós. The islands were named by Captain James Cook in 1774 and subsequently colonised by both the British and the French.
A condominium is an ownership regime in which a building is divided into multiple units that are either each separately owned, or owned in common with exclusive rights of occupation by individual owners. These individual units are surrounded by common areas that are jointly owned and managed by the owners of the units. The term can be applied to the building or complex itself, and is sometimes applied to individual units. The term "condominium" is mostly used in the US and Canada, but similar arrangements are used in many other countries under different names.
The Treaty of Kiel or Peace of Kiel was concluded between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Kingdom of Sweden on one side and the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway on the other side on 14 January 1814 in Kiel. It ended the hostilities between the parties in the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, where the United Kingdom and Sweden were part of the anti-French camp while Denmark–Norway was allied to France.
The special territories of members of the European Economic Area (EEA) are the 32 special territories of EU member states and EFTA member states which, for historical, geographical, or political reasons, enjoy special status within or outside the European Union and the European Free Trade Association.
An exclusive economic zone (EEZ), as prescribed by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is an area of the sea in which a sovereign state has exclusive rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind.
The Svalbard Treaty recognises the sovereignty of Norway over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, at the time called Spitsbergen. The exercise of sovereignty is, however, subject to certain stipulations, and not all Norwegian law applies. The treaty restricts military uses of the archipelago, but it is not demilitarized. The signatories were given equal rights to engage in commercial activities on the islands. As of 2024, Norway and Russia make use of this right.
A currency union is an intergovernmental agreement that involves two or more states sharing the same currency. These states may not necessarily have any further integration.
The Gastein Convention, also called the Convention of Badgastein, was a treaty signed at Bad Gastein in Austria on 14 August 1865. It embodied agreements between the two principal powers of the German Confederation, Prussia and Austria, over the governing of the 'Elbe Duchies' of Schleswig, Holstein and Saxe-Lauenburg.
The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and former state: after Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, four countries representing the Allies asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria; the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.
In international relations, a concession is a "synallagmatic act by which a State transfers the exercise of rights or functions proper to itself to a foreign private test which, in turn, participates in the performance of public functions and thus gains a privileged position vis-a-vis other private law subjects within the jurisdiction of the State concerned." International concessions are not defined in international law and do not generally fall under it. Rather, they are governed by the municipal law of the conceding state. There may, however, be a law of succession for such concessions, whereby the concession is continued even when the conceding state ceases to exist.
An international zone is any area not fully subject to the border control policies of the state in which it is located. There are several types of international zones ranging from special economic zones and sterile zones at ports of entry exempt from customs rules to concessions over which administration is ceded to one or more foreign states. International zones may also maintain distinct visa policies from the rest of the surrounding state.
A colonial empire is a collective of territories, either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.
The Treaty of Vienna was a peace treaty signed on 30 October 1864 in Vienna between the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Kingdom of Denmark. The treaty ended the Second War of Schleswig. Denmark ceded the Duchy of Schleswig the Duchy of Holstein and the Duchy of Lauenburg. They would be jointly governed by Prussia and Austria in a condominium. A subsequent treaty between Austria and Prussia on August 14, 1865 known as the Gastein Convention provided that Prussia would administer Schleswig and Austria would similarly govern Holstein. Austria also sold its rights over Lauenburg to Prussia. Disputes over the administration of Schleswig and Holstein would lead to the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. When that war was over, Prussia annexed Schleswig and Holstein.
An international city is an autonomous or semi-autonomous city-state that is separate from the direct supervision of any single nation-state.
In politics, a partition is a change of political borders cutting through at least one territory considered a homeland by some community.
Germany colonized Africa during two distinct periods. In the 1680s, the Margraviate of Brandenburg, then leading the broader realm of Brandenburg-Prussia, pursued limited imperial efforts in West Africa. The Brandenburg African Company was chartered in 1682 and established two small settlements on the Gold Coast of what is today Ghana. Five years later, a treaty with the king of Arguin in Mauritania established a protectorate over that island, and Brandenburg occupied an abandoned fort originally constructed there by Portugal. Brandenburg — after 1701, the Kingdom of Prussia — pursued these colonial efforts until 1721, when Arguin was captured by the French and the Gold Coast settlements were sold to the Dutch Republic.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)I don't know when the Hadf zone agreement was terminated, but it certainly was.