Home / ITLOS Order 2026/4 (Case No. 35, TOML v. ISA)

Order of 10 June 2026 (Order 2026/4) in the Case concerning an inquiry by the International Seabed Authority (Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. v. International Seabed Authority)

order · adopted 2026-06-10 · itlos/order/case35-order4-2026

Provenance

Official citation: Order 2026/4, Case concerning an inquiry by the International Seabed Authority (Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. v. International Seabed Authority), ITLOS List of Cases No. 35
Source: International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) · official source
Retrieved: 2026-09-15
Authentic languages: en, fr
Status: authentic_text · fidelity: extracted_verified
Content hash: sha256:17d9e2271…

SCOPE (JC-007): ITLOS decisions in proceedings concerning the Area are in scope; party pleadings are not. IDENTIFIER (JC-008): case-number based, order decoded as Case <n>, Order No. <m> of <year> - here Case No. 35, Order 2026/4, which the instrument states itself in its header and its first line. This is the paired order to itlos/order/case34-order3-2026, issued the same day in the parallel proceeding brought by the other applicant; the two texts are word-for-word identical apart from the case number, the order number and the party name, which is what a diff of the two reconciled texts shows and nothing else. WHAT THIS ORDER DOES: it is procedural and short. The President of the Seabed Disputes Chamber, having regard to the Request submitted by TOML on 5 June 2026 for the prescription of provisional measures under article 290, paragraph 1, of the Convention, and having regard to the Application filed on 5 June 2026, FIXES 2 July 2026 as the date for the opening of the oral proceedings and RESERVES the subsequent procedure for further decision. No provisional measures are prescribed in it; the measures come with the Order of the Chamber of 18 July 2026. TEXT RECOVERY - TWO ENGINES, NOT A VENDOR LAYER. The PDF is a scan: each page is one image and the embedded text is an Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 22 Paper Capture layer. That layer was NOT adopted: it is a third, unversioned engine, it cannot be re-derived, and it is demonstrably wrong in it. The text here is the consensus of Tesseract 5.5.0 (psm 6, oem 3, eng) and RapidOCR (rapidocr-onnxruntime 1.4.4 / onnxruntime 1.30.0 / PP-OCRv4 ONNX), both run over the same 300-dpi page renders and reconciled by hand against them. Disagreement sites: RapidOCR adopted for the Registrar's given name 'Ximena' (Tesseract read 'ximene'); Tesseract adopted for the recital lines, where RapidOCR dropped tokens and merged lines; and Tesseract's reading of a scanner edge mark as '|' at the head of the last recital line was dropped as non-text. Agreement was measured, not asserted: 99.1% (page 1) and 99.0% (page 2) of characters agree after removing all whitespace, while the naive word agreement of 48.1% and 61.6% is an artefact of RapidOCR dropping inter-word spaces in centred display lines - both numbers are recorded so they are not confused for one another. ADJUDICATED ON THE PAGE AND RETAINED, NOT 'CORRECTED': this order reads 'Having regard to the Request submitted by TOML Registry on 5 June 2026'. The word 'Registry' is printed on the page (its sibling order reads 'submitted by NORI', with no such word). It is a drafting slip in the instrument and it is reproduced as printed, because the corpus records the authentic text rather than the text the maintainer would have written. For the same reason 'transmitted to the TOML and the Authority' keeps its article, which is also on the page. NON-TEXT DROPPED: the handwritten signature strokes (Tesseract emitted them as 'Pr 4', RapidOCR omitted them) - signatures are not part of the authentic text, the typed names beneath them are. WHY THIS RECORD IS EXCLUDED FROM THE REPRODUCIBILITY GATE: see scripts/repro-policy.json. Reproduction needs the OCR toolchain, not committed deterministic code, so the gate cannot re-derive this text; that is an honest exclusion, not a coverage gap, and original.pdf with its recorded hash remains the authoritative anchor. COVERAGE GAP: the order closes 'Done in English and in French, both texts being equally authoritative' (cf. JC-004), so French is an equally authentic text; no French version is published, and it would be ingested as this record's -fr sibling under JC-006 when one appears.

Authoritative text

List of Cases No. 35 Order 2026/4

INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL FOR THE LAW OF THE SEA

YEAR 2026

10 June 2026

CASE CONCERNING AN INQUIRY

BY THE INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY

(TONGA OFFSHORE MINING LTD. v. INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY)

REQUEST FOR THE PRESCRIPTION OF PROVISIONAL MEASURES

UNDER ARTICLE 290, PARAGRAPH 1, OF THE UNITED NATIONS

CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA

ORDER

The President of the Seabed Disputes Chamber (hereinafter "the Chamber") of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (hereinafter "the Tribunal"),

Having regard to article 290, paragraph 1, of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (hereinafter "the Convention"),

Having regard to articles 25, 27 and 40, paragraph 1, of the Statute of the Tribunal,

Having regard to articles 45, 90, paragraph 2, and 115 of the Rules of the Tribunal,

Having regard to the Application of Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. (hereinafter "TOML") filed with the Registry on 5 June 2026 instituting proceedings against the International Seabed Authority (hereinafter "the Authority"),

Having regard to the Request submitted by TOML Registry on 5 June 2026 for the prescription of provisional measures by the Chamber in accordance with article 290, paragraph 1, of the Convention,

Having ascertained the views of the Parties,

Fixes 2 July 2026 as the date for the opening of the oral proceedings;

Reserves the subsequent procedure for further decision.

Done in English and in French, both texts being equally authoritative, in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, this tenth day of June two thousand and twenty-six, in three copies, one of which will be placed in the archives of the Tribunal and the others transmitted to the TOML and the Authority, respectively.

David Joseph ATTARD

President of the Seabed Disputes Chamber

Ximena HINRICHS OYARCE

Registrar

Concept tags derived · unofficial · model · unreviewed

Provision	Concepts
(whole text)	dispute_settlement_and_advisory_opinions