Exercising Maritime Boundaries in Wetar Strait

After a long time sleep, I finally started exercising the maritime boundary delimitation between Indonesia and Timor Leste as the main research of my master study. The first boundary location exercised was Wetar Strait situating in the sea area between Wetar Island and eastern part of Timor Island, which belongs to Timor Leste. The existence of Pulau Atauro (of Timor Leste) between Pulau Wetar and Pulau Alor (of Indonesia) makes this exercise challenging. As Pulau Atauro is an island, it is entitled to a 12 nautical mile of-territorial sea. Therefore a segment of Indonesian archipelagic straight baseline that departs from a basepoint in eastern edge of Pulau Alor to a basepoint in the western edge of Pulau Wetar cuts the territorial sea of Pulau Atauro. This is most likely not preferable to Timor Leste and consequently has to be considered. In this case, the segment of archipelagic straight baseline can be ignored.

This figure shows the configuration of baselines, territorial sea limits and boundary line between Indonesia and Timor Leste in Wetar Strait. As seen above, Indonesia employs the archipelagic straight baselines (black lines) while Timor Leste uses normal baselines. The green lines are coast lines, which, for Timor Leste, also serve as normal baseline. The orange lines represent territorial sea limit of both states and the blue line is the boundary. Some segments represent territorial sea boundaries while some others depict the EEZ boundaries.