Proceedings of the Workshop - United Nations Office for Outer ...

Rescue Agreement1968 Rescue Agreement – An OverviewRobert C. BeckmanAssociate Professor & Vice-Dean, Faculty of LawNational University of SingaporeIntroductionThe Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts, and the Return ofObjects Launched into Outer Space, 1968 (hereafter “1968 Rescue Agreement”) was adopted on19 December 1967. It was opened for signature on 22 April 1968, and it entered into force on 3December 1968.As of 1 September 2003, 88 States are parties and another 25 States are signatories. Inaddition, one international organization, the European Space Agency, has declared that it acceptsthe rights and obligations in the Agreement.The parties to the 1968 Rescue Agreement include all of the space powers. In East Asia,China, Japan, Mongolia, Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation are parties. TheDemocratic People’s Republic of Korea is not a party to this Agreement or to any of the othertreaties on outer space. In South Asia, India, Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan are parties;Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are not. In Southeast Asia, the status of the 1968 Rescue Agreement ismore mixed. Four States are parties (Indonesia, Laos, Singapore and Thailand); four States aresignatories (Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines and Vietnam); and two States are neither parties norsignatories (Brunei and Cambodia).I. BackgroundThe 1968 Rescue Agreement was the second of the four space law treaties to be adopted,and the first to be adopted after the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The Soviet Union pushed for thisagreement to be concluded before the agreement on liability. The Soviet Union attached greatimportance to this agreement because it had fewer resources than the United States for recoveringreturning spacecraft and astronauts from the high seas in all parts of the world, and it wastherefore more likely than the United States to require assistance from third States.The 1968 Rescue Agreement was drafted and adopted in record time. Like the otherinternational instruments on space law that were agreed upon during the Cold War, the two superspacepowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, played a predominant role in drafting thetext. The two major space powers agreed upon a text and jointly submitted it to Legal Sub-Committee of COPUOS on 13 December 1967, just one day before it was scheduled to meet. The