Who owns marine genetic resources, and who owes what to whom?
This is one of the most consequential governance questions in contemporary international law, and one of the hardest to answer. Marine genetic resources sit at the centre of biotechnological innovation across pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and industrial biotech. Yet the international rules governing their access, use, and benefit-sharing are spread across six instruments that do not quite fit together: UNCLOS, TRIPS, the CBD, the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO GRATK Treaty, and the BBNJ Agreement. The result is overlapping rights, contradictory obligations, and gaps that practitioners have to navigate without much help from the texts themselves.
In our new article in the Leiden Journal of International Law, Rohan Nanda, Júlia Schütz Veiga, and I operationalise Wesley Hohfeld’s relational framework to map the legal positions across all six instruments. The mapping shows where claim-rights, duties, powers, and immunities align, where they collide, and where the asymmetries lie. Particular attention goes to benefit-sharing and the treatment of digital sequence information. The paper is accompanied by a manually curated, machine-readable dataset of the mapped positions, intended as a resource for further research.
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156526100703
The article has also been selected for a feature in Issue 26 (May 2026) of Deep-Sea Life, the joint magazine of the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI) and the Deep-Sea Biology Society. The feature places the paper directly in front of the marine scientists, ocean policy practitioners, and BBNJ delegations it was written to engage.
Link to the magazine: Deep-Sea Life, Issue 26
This work was supported by the ELS Academy and Maastricht University Faculty of Law as part of the AI and Marine Environmental Policy (AIMEP) research programme.
Henrique Marcos 