Treaty Obligations W-O Recognition Capacity - Sendai Framework

The talk looks at the Svalbard region in the High North, where a 2022 fault on one of two subsea telecom cables left the archipelago without redundancy for about 17 months. The presenters place this next to a wiper attack on satellite modems that spilled over into the area and to ongoing GNSS jamming that disrupts aviation. No one claimed the cable fault, and officials treated the repeated trawler crossings as lawful fishing. The core problem they describe is legal: the 1884 cable convention and UNCLOS give jurisdiction mainly to the flag state, and the Svalbard Treaty and the other regimes do not share data. Each incident therefore sits in a separate domain and is never recognised as one campaign.

The second half proposes a remedy that needs no new treaty. One presenter describes the Sendai Framework's hazard information profiles and the statistical framework built on them, arguing they are motive-blind and can link events that share effects, timing and location. Two missing profiles, for satellite navigation interference and for submarine cable damage, would fill the gap. The proposal also names a single recording authority for the corridor, data sharing from cable operators and marine insurers, and a restored reporting channel for jamming. The argument is that consultation under NATO Article 4 becomes possible once a campaign-level record exists.

The practical takeaway is that recognition capacity is cheap to build before an incident and expensive afterward. Correlating faults, incidents and interference reports into one schema can make a campaign visible without deciding attribution, which remains with the institutions that already hold that role.