Law of the Sea 01 • Sovereignty • Sovereign Rights • Jurisdiction
"Maritime rights" under Taiwan's Ocean Basic Act are not a single right but a three-tier structure of decreasing strength — sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction — running from internal waters and the territorial sea out to the contiguous zone, EEZ, and high seas. The three tiers map onto three governance missions: national security, maritime law-and-order, and maritime safety. Submarine cables, as critical national infrastructure, sit inside this structure — so where a cable is cut determines which tier of power the state can bring to bear.
Article 1 of Taiwan's Ocean Basic Act declares that the state shall "safeguard maritime rights and ensure national security." The phrase is often treated as an abstract slogan, but it has a fairly precise structure in international law. In short, it is the sum of the rights a state may assert in different maritime zones under international law — above all the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) — and those rights are not of uniform strength.
To understand cable protection and enforcement you must first grasp this: a state's power over the sea is layered and decreasing. The closer to land, the more complete the power; the farther offshore, the more constrained, until on the high seas almost nothing remains but jurisdiction over one's own flagged ships.
Maritime rights, from strongest to weakest, fall into three tiers. They are not parallel categories but a spectrum that dims from the shoreline outward.
The three tiers of maritime rights map onto three different kinds of ocean-governance mission. This mapping helps clarify whose problem a cable cut really is, and which toolkit applies.
A single cable cut can span all three tiers at once: ostensibly a maritime accident, substantively a law-and-order crime, and potentially a national-security threat underneath. That is why no single legal tool suffices — and why this site publishes behavioral signals for cross-disciplinary assessment.
There is a very practical reason to put submarine cables inside the "maritime rights" discussion: they are not ordinary seabed fixtures but critical national infrastructure.
This means cutting a submarine cable does not attack "internet speed" — it attacks the nervous system of an entire society and state. For an island that is heavily dependent on external connectivity and sits on a geopolitical front line, cable security and national security are almost synonyms. So the Ocean Basic Act's pledge to "safeguard maritime rights" must, in Taiwan's context, include holding these invisible cables.
The next article, Submarine Cables Under International Law, explains what protection international law actually offers these cables — and the fatal gaps it leaves behind.
The concepts on this page can be verified against these public, authoritative sources:
The three-tier framework and Yehliu cable-cut case study draw on Li Yefei, "The Legal Structure of the Ocean Basic Act, Lecture 12: Maritime Rights — The Chunghwa Telecom Yehliu Cable-Cut Incident," Contemporary Law Journal, March 2025.
This page is for research and education; detection signals are leads to investigate, not legal or factual findings. See the methodology.