Marine biodiversity as an object of International Law is currently gaining increasing importance, as evidenced by the adoption in 2023 of the “Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction”. The Russian Federation, for a number of justified reasons, has not joined the States that signed this international treaty. In this context, this article presents the contemporary characteristics of the measures agreed upon by States of conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity of the World Ocean. The used methods are general scientific and specific (including comparative legal) ones, with special attention to the issues of interpretation of the applicable norms of the 2023 Agreement and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity. The article predicts, based on the results of the study, that universal treaty norms on the marine biodiversity will be further refined, including norms at the regional level. At the same time, authors show the importance of multi-level cooperation of States in this area, the demand for more specific regulation of such cooperation.
Polina Sotskova (2025) studied this question.