A guarantee of the right of ships of all flags to travel in the Pilawska Strait has become one of Poland's aims as a result of the lack of agreement on the part of the Russian government to open the strait for international shipping. In December 2004, however, a Polish project was presented for an agreement between the Republic of Poland and the government of the Russian Federation concerning shipping in the Vistula Lagoon and through the Pilawska Strait. The project proposes that the Pilawska Strait should be designated an international strait, in which shipping is only subject to Russian law and not to international law. The author of this essay does not agree with the official position of the Polish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in the matter of recognizing the Pilawska Strait as an international strait. He also does not agree with the international legal argument justifying Poland's claim to use the Pilawska Strait and the opening of the Strait to international shipping.
This article may provoke interest in Poland's activity in connection with the potential extraction o f natural wealth from the sea bed. The international concern Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM) was set up in Szczecin in 1987. Poland has been a member from the very beginning of IOM. To this day Poland is involved in conducting exploration of a specific sector. The sector is in the area of Clarion-Clipperton in the Pacific, and it has a surface area of 52,300 km2. Registration as a pioneer investor made research, rather than exploitation, possible (1991). The exploration of the submarine area allocated to Poland became possible in 2000.
The obligation of states to guarantee the sustainable use of the natural resources of the seas and oceans is a result of the regulations of international law. Above all, these emphasize the necessity of linking the process of managing those resources with protection of the marine environment in which they occur. Less attention, however, is paid to the social consequences of not fulfilling the duty to use resources sustainable. The subject of this article is the heterogeneous scope of rights and duties of individual states to use marine resources, dependent on the geographical localization of these resources. Attention will also be given to the central role which is fulfilled, in the context o f the law of the sea, by the whole set of legal principles, according to which states using resources should be guided with the aim of ensuring the sustainable exploitation of those resources.