SPEECH BY H.E. DR EDWARD FENECH ADAMI, PRESIDENT OF MALTA, AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE 32^ND PACEM IN MARIBUS CONFERENCE - ATTARD

The holding of a Pacem in Maribus convocation once again in Malta is like the celebration of a home coming.

This hotel was the very cradle in which Pacem in Maribus was placed at birth.  The first third of the series were also held here.  After that, because of certain not very happy circumstances in Malta, Pacem in Maribus (or PIM as it came to be affectionately referred to) began to lead a Nomad existence.  Admittedly, mobility has a number of advantages over stability; but I was happy indeed to welcome Pacem in Maribus back in Malta very soon after I became Prime Minister.  The waves of change proved to be for another decade more attractive than a fixed anchorage:  Pacem in Maribus only visited Malta once again until today.  The present 32^nd Pacem in Maribus may prove to be, I am told, the beginning of a new series that will seek to combine the virtues of both stability and mobility by being held alternately in Malta and elsewhere.

There are a few faithful persons present today who were here on the historic occasion of the 1^st Pacem in Maribus, but because of the ravages of time, they are not many.  I salute them; and I welcome all the rest who have now satisfied any natural curiosity they had to see what the birthplace of Pacem in Maribus, where most of the best ideas now incorporated in the Law of the Sea were conceived, looks like.

The theme of this Convocation makes it almost inevitable that I, like I am sure many of you, would want to recall that the real founder of Pacem in Maribus was a woman, she was indeed the author of a most remarkable book called “The Ascent of Woman” that is one of the earliest manifestos of contemporary feminism, or rather of a brand of it that has remained unique.  I am by no means sure that the contributions made by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, both to the Law of the Sea and also incidentally to the political life of Malta, had anything specifically feminine about them;  but it is certain that she was the person specifically responsible for developing the idea of the Common Heritage of Humankind in two directions:  first, the concept was applicable not only to the seabed but even more so to a range of resources stretching from Antarctica to the Human Genome;  secondly she also argued that the application of the concept of the Common Heritage not just to the seabed but to the whole of ocean space, as advocated by Arvid Pardo, carried with it a new cultural approach to the ocean.  The old idea that a human being was an essentially terrestrial animal was superseded.  To go down to the sea in ships, or in submarines or even in underwater settlements, was not to violate any divine law:  there was no such law establishing a rigid separation between the chaotic sea and peacefully ordered land.  Pacem in Maribus might even be the most intelligent way of preparing for the Pacem in Terris that Pope John XXIII had described in his famous Encyclical. 

An important corollary of this thesis was that “human being” meant both man and woman.  Of course, woman had always had, in their way, as profound a relationship with the sea as men:  but that of a sailor’s wife or a fisherman’s daughter or even a woman enlisted in the Royal Navy or any other Navy, tended to be gender-specific; it was at any rate quite different from a man’s.  Partly because of the all-pervasive influence that the development of Information and Communication Technology is having on all forms of human life including navigation and ocean-related activities, the sharp distinction between male and female involvement with the sea is obviously changing:  and it calls for the kind consideration that you are about to give it.  The same kind of change warrants also the re-examination of the new potentialities in the relationship with the ocean of upcoming generations.

It is not my task to go into these issues, or the others implied in the convocation’s mentioning of the marine environment and sustainable development in its sub-title.  I am her only to signify to you with the utmost brevity that our small Island State – that once proposed the new Law of the Sea and later the consideration of a climate change to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the same Malta that has stimulated a new awareness in the European Union, since our accession to membership of it, of the importance of Europe’s Territorial Seas, Exclusive Economic Zones and coastal areas  -  sincerely welcomes the International Ocean Institute’s probing of the new issues that keep arising from both the depths and the surface of the ocean.

I cannot but wish you the most total success in your endeavours.