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The Taba Case: Some Recollections and Reflections*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2016
Extract
The Taba Case is so called because, although it involved fourteen disputed points on the boundary between Israel and Egypt, the most important area of dispute lay at the delta where the Wadi Taba runs down from the Sinai hills into the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba. Here, on the eastern part of the delta, close to the sea, a substantial hotel was built in 1982 with the consent of Israel. Before that date the delta had been practically empty. Taba was not the name of an inhabited place. It was merely the southern terminus, on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, of the border between Israel and Egypt. For a while, there was an Egyptian police post on the west side of the Wadi. In the thirties there was also a rest house occasionally used for recreational purposes by a British official working for the Government of Palestine. Otherwise, until the hotel was built, the place was uninhabited and without economic, strategic or even political importance. Yet the disagreement between Egypt and Israel in this connection between 1979 and 1985 added significantly to the difficulties in the political relationship between the two countries.
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1989
Footnotes
**
Director of the Research Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. The author was leading Counsel for Israel in the arbitration.
References
1 The award has been printed in 80 International Law Reports 224, to which all references herein will be made.
2 The case is reported in full in 38 International Law Reports 10. For an outstanding and very close analysis of the manner in which arbitral tribunals have often “adjusted” boundaries in the course of deciding upon them, see Munkman, , “Adjudication and Adjustment – International Judicial Decision and the Settlement of Territorial and Boundary Disputes” (1972–1973) 46 Br. Yrbk Int'l L. 1 Google Scholar.
3 80 I.L.R. 283-4.
4 Ibid., at 283.
5 Id.
6 Id.
7 Id.
8 Id.
9 Ibid., at 300.
10 Ibid., at 301.
11 Ibid., at 308, para. 240. In fact the Parker photographs had been published in Winstone, H.V.F., The Diaries of Parker Pasha (London, 1983)Google Scholar. Copies of pp. 96-97 of the book, containing the relevant photographs, were transmitted by the British Government to both the Egyptian and the Israeli Governments in June 1985, some 15 months before the signature of the Arbitration Agreement.
12 Ibid., at 283, para. 170.
13 Ibid., at 283.
14 Ibid., at 361.
15 Ibid., at 361.
16 Ibid., at 309, para. 243.
17 Ibid., at 308, para. 242.
18 Id.
19 Ibid., at 306-307.
20 Ibid., at 306.
21 Ibid., at 307.
22 Id.
23 Ibid., at 304-305.
24 Ibid., at 305.
25 Ibid., at 307, para. 237.
26 Ibid., at 306, para. 235.
27 38 I.L.R. 10.
28 52 I.L.R. 93.