Macbeth at the International Seabed Authority

Macbeth begins from a problem that law also knows well: prophecy does not merely announce the future; it reorganises the present. The Weird Sisters do not place the crown on Macbeth’s head. They make kingship appear as a future already waiting. Ambition borrows the language of destiny. Choice begins to look like fulfilment; contingency hardens into inevitability.

This piece argues that a similar structure is visible in the debate on deep seabed mining. The point is not that commercial exploitation of mineral resources in the Area will necessarily occur, nor that demand for critical minerals is legally irrelevant. It is that a projected sequence is increasingly treated as if it already carried legal force: the energy transition will require minerals; polymetallic nodules contain some of them; technology will advance; the Draft Exploitation Regulations; contractors will mine; States will regulate. I call this prophetic capture: the tendency of a regulatory system to organise its procedures around a future that certain actors have declared inevitable.

The recent proceedings instituted by Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI) and Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. (TOML) against the International Seabed Authority (ISA) show that deep seabed mining is no longer only a matter of future design. It is already being tested through timelines, sponsorship relationships, regulatory texts, and dispute settlement. The legal danger is therefore not only that mining may proceed before the law is ready. It is that law may be hurried into readiness because it has accepted, in advance, the prophecy that mining must proceed.

The Prophecy of Critical Minerals

The most familiar prophecy is built around critical minerals. Its syllogism is simple: the energy transition requires minerals; some of those minerals can be found in the deep seabed; therefore, deep seabed mining must be authorised. The first proposition may be correct. The second is factual. The third does not follow.

There are serious arguments about security of supply, terrestrial extraction, and the mineral demands of decarbonisation. But, within the legal framework governing activities in the Area, those arguments do not convert demand into entitlement. Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the 1994 Implementation Agreement, and the ISA’s rules, regulations, and procedures operate against the background of the common heritage of humankind and the obligation to protect and preserve the marine environment. A projected market does not suspend those obligations. Scarcity does not decide whether the common heritage of humankind may be converted into an extractive frontier.

This distinction matters because exploitation is not a technical consequence of mineral demand. It must pass through legal filters: environmental impact assessment, precaution, due diligence, effective control, benefit-sharing, transparency, and institutional accountability. The rhetoric of critical minerals becomes problematic when these filters are presented as delays to be overcome, rather than as conditions that determine whether the activity can lawfully proceed at all. Macbeth may become king. Critical minerals may be needed. Deep seabed mining may one day occur. But a possible future is not a necessary future.

Ambition Disguised as Destiny

Macbeth is not passively deceived by prophecy. He is prepared to be deceived by it. The prophecy works because it gives external shape to an ambition already present. The Weird Sisters speak; Macbeth supplies the action.

Deep seabed mining has a similar structure. The pressure toward exploitation does not arise from geology, technology, or the energy transition alone. It is produced by corporate strategies, State sponsorship, institutional timelines, investment expectations, and the gradual normalisation of exploitation as the endpoint of the regime. Ambition is not only corporate. It is also institutional.

The legal setting is Part XI of UNCLOS, as modified by the 1994 Implementation Agreement. The “Area” means the seabed and ocean floor, and their subsoil, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. Its mineral resources are governed as the common heritage of humankind. The ISA is the organisation through which States Parties organise and control mineral-resources-related activities in the Area, not simply an agency for enabling extraction.

Private contractors therefore do not enter the Area as autonomous market actors. They operate through sponsoring States, under contracts approved within the ISA system, and subject to obligations that depend on the interaction between international rules, domestic implementation, institutional supervision, and corporate conduct. The Seabed Disputes Chamber’s 2011 Advisory Opinion remains central for this reason. It links sponsoring State responsibilities to due diligence, the precautionary approach, environmental impact assessment, and necessary and appropriate measures. These obligations are the legal means by which the sponsorship system is supposed to prevent the Area from being governed by mere formalities.

The ISA and the Legal Production of Inevitability

The ISA is now the principal institutional site in which this prophecy is translated into procedure. The Council, a 36-member organ elected by the Assembly and the Authority’s executive organ, is the body in which the Draft Exploitation Regulations remain under negotiation. Informal working groups, intersessional working groups, and “Friends of the President” have been used to advance work on the text. This is the legal framework through which exploitation may become administratively feasible.

The two-year rule sharpened this temporal pressure. Under section 1, paragraph 15, of the Annex to the 1994 Implementation Agreement, a State whose national intends to apply for an exploitation plan of work may request the Council to complete the relevant rules, regulations, and procedures within two years. If they are not completed and an application is pending, the Council must nevertheless consider it on the basis of the Convention, the Agreement, and any rules provisionally adopted. In 2021, Nauru invoked this mechanism in anticipation of an application by NORI, a Nauruan entity sponsored by the Government of Nauru and a subsidiary of The Metals Company.

The point is not that Nauru acted outside the legal framework. The point is more uncomfortable: the legal framework itself contains procedural devices capable of turning institutional delay into regulatory urgency. A procedural acceleration clause must still be read together with UNCLOS’s protective architecture, including the duty to protect and preserve the marine environment, the ISA’s obligation to ensure effective protection from harmful effects, and the due diligence obligations of sponsoring States. It cannot invert the burden of justification by requiring precautionary restraint to justify itself against an assumed future of exploitation.

The recent NORI and TOML proceedings should be placed against this background. They are not isolated procedural episodes. They belong to a broader institutional struggle in which the future of mining is contested through timelines, regulatory texts, requests for provisional measures, dispute settlement, and sponsorship relationships. The question cannot be reduced to technical completion of the Mining Code. The harder question is whether the legal process remains capable of asking the prior normative question: should commercial exploitation proceed at all under conditions of scientific uncertainty, institutional contestation, and unresolved distributive concerns?

Precaution Against Prophecy

The precautionary approach is a legal refusal of false certainty. It requires decision-makers not to treat the absence of full scientific certainty as permission where there are plausible risks of serious or irreversible harm. It is not hostility to science, technology, or the energy transition. Its function is to prevent uncertain environmental consequences from being translated into authorisation merely because some actors frame delay as failure.

In the deep seabed context, this is not marginal. The deep ocean is not an empty space awaiting rational administration. It is an environmentally complex and still insufficiently understood part of the Earth system. The potential impacts of commercial-scale mining on benthic ecosystems, sediment plumes, biodiversity, and cumulative harm remain uncertain, and existing evidence suggests impacts that may persist over long timeframes.

Precaution should therefore not be treated as an abstract environmental preference. In the Area, it operates through concrete legal relationships: sponsoring States must exercise due diligence; contractors must be supervised; environmental impact assessment must inform decision-making; and the ISA’s procedures must remain capable of withholding authorisation where the legal conditions for exploitation are not met.

Precaution, then, is a discipline against prophecy. It keeps the future legally open. It resists the conversion of projected demand into present entitlement. It requires institutions and States to remain capable of saying: not yet, not under these conditions, not with this evidence, not with this level of control, or not at all. Without that possibility, a legal system is not regulating. It is administering inevitability.

Due Diligence, Effective Control, and Sponsorships of Convenience

The problem becomes more acute when viewed through the sponsorship regime. Under UNCLOS, private contractors require sponsorship. The sponsoring State has the responsibility to ensure that activities in the Area are carried out in conformity with the Convention, the 1994 Implementation Agreement, and the rules, regulations, and procedures of the Authority.

This responsibility is not symbolic. A sponsoring State must adopt laws and regulations, take administrative measures, supervise sponsored contractors, ensure compliance, apply precaution, require environmental impact assessment, and provide effective mechanisms of enforcement and liability. If these obligations are reduced to documentary requirements, sponsorship risks becoming a jurisdictional gateway rather than a system of control.

Effective control matters because a system built around formal sponsorship can be hollowed out from within. The point is not that sponsorship is identical to flag-of-convenience shipping. It is that both raise a similar legal anxiety: whether a formal jurisdictional link can separate regulatory authority from real economic control, technical capacity, and environmental responsibility.

The prophecy of inevitable mining makes this more likely. If exploitation is presumed to be the regime’s destination, questions of effective control, regulatory capacity, environmental liability, and sponsorship integrity may be treated as administrative refinements. They are not refinements. They are conditions for the legitimacy of the system itself. Due diligence is not satisfied by appearance alone: it demands capacity, supervision, and a real possibility of preventing harm rather than merely compensating for it after the fact.

Otherwise, sponsorship becomes another form of prophecy. A certificate announces control, and the legal system behaves as if control exists. The announcement, however, does not create the reality. Just as prophecy does not crown Macbeth, sponsorship does not by itself generate effective governance.

Against Fatalism, Not Against the Future

The point is not to oppose the energy transition or to romanticise technological restraint. The point is narrower, and more legal: the regime governing activities in the Area should not confuse projected futures with binding destinations. Its protective functions — precaution, environmental impact assessment, due diligence, effective control, benefit-sharing, and institutional accountability — must remain capable of interrupting, and not merely administering, the movement toward exploitation.

The future of the Area has not yet been written. Deep seabed mining may be defended, opposed, paused, redesigned, or blocked where the legal conditions for authorisation are not met. Each possibility remains legally available only if the language of inevitability is resisted. Once inevitability takes hold, law is left to negotiate the terms of a future it no longer believes it can refuse.

Macbeth’s tragedy is not that he hears a prophecy. It is that he mistakes prophecy for necessity and ambition for fate. The common heritage of humankind was not created to baptise inevitability. It was created to prevent the Area from being appropriated by the few in the name of the many. If that principle is still to discipline deep seabed mining, it must remain connected to the concrete legal conditions of authorisation: precaution where science remains uncertain, due diligence where sponsorship creates risk, effective control where corporate and State interests diverge, and institutional accountability where procedure begins to resemble destiny. Only then can law interrupt the prophecy before ambition completes it.