The last territories with no permanent population — and who is quietly claiming them

Between Egypt and Sudan there is a trapezoid of desert, 2,060 square kilometres, that no country on Earth claims. It is called Bir Tawil. It has no permanent inhabitants, no infrastructure, no resources worth extracting at current prices. Ababda and Bishari pastoralists pass through. Unregulated gold miners have set up camps. In 2014, a Virginia man named Jeremiah Heaton planted a homemade flag in the sand so his seven-year-old daughter could call herself a princess. No government recognised the claim. No government ever will.

Seventeen hundred kilometres south of Tokyo, two rocks protrude from the Pacific — barely. At high tide the larger clears the waterline by centimetres. Japan has encased both in concrete breakwaters, steel reinforcement, and titanium netting. It has built a radar station, a small harbour, and a research platform on stilts in the surrounding lagoon. It rotates personnel through on a schedule. The total bill since 1987 exceeds 75 billion yen — more than $600 million spent keeping two specks of coral above the waterline.

Why would a country refuse free desert and spend a fortune on two rocks that would vanish in a decade without intervention?

Because Bir Tawil is landlocked. And Okinotorishima sits in the ocean.

The territory nobody wants

The Bir Tawil anomaly is a cartographic accident that has calcified into permanence. In 1899, Britain drew the political boundary between Egypt and its Anglo-Egyptian condominium in Sudan along the 22nd parallel — a clean line through empty desert, the kind of administrative convenience colonial powers favoured because it required no knowledge of local geography. In 1902, a separate administrative boundary was drawn to reflect the reality that certain tribes north of the 22nd parallel had stronger ties to Khartoum than to Cairo, and that the Ababda people south of it oriented toward Egypt. The administrative line deviated from the political line in two places. It placed the Halaib Triangle — roughly 20,580 square kilometres of Red Sea coastline, including the port town of Halaib and a settled population — under Sudanese authority. It placed Bir Tawil, a sliver of inland desert, under Egyptian authority.

When Sudan gained independence in 1956, both countries reached for the boundary that gave them Halaib. Egypt asserts the 1899 political line: Halaib is Egyptian, Bir Tawil is Sudanese. Sudan asserts the 1902 administrative line: Halaib is Sudanese, Bir Tawil is Egyptian. Since 1994, Egypt has held Halaib with military force and administered it as part of the Red Sea Governorate. Sudan protests but lacks the leverage to reverse the occupation.

And nobody argues about Bir Tawil, because claiming it means conceding the boundary that yields Halaib. The Halaib Triangle has a Red Sea coastline, a population, a port, manganese deposits, and — crucially — potential offshore resources in waters that remain largely unexplored. Bir Tawil has sand.

The result is unique in modern geopolitics: a habitable territory that exists in a sovereignty vacuum. Not disputed — abandoned. The handful of individuals who have “claimed” it are legally irrelevant. International law provides no mechanism for a private citizen to acquire sovereignty over terra nullius. Heaton’s flag, planted for a Washington Post story about a father’s devotion, means nothing. The desert remains no one’s.

But Bir Tawil’s irrelevance is specific. It has no coastline. And in the twenty-first century, that single absence makes it worthless in the only calculus that drives states to claim empty territory. The question is why.

How water became more valuable than land

The mechanism is UNCLOS — the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982, in force since 1994. Under its provisions, any state with a coastline is entitled to a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone: sovereign rights over every living and non-living resource in the water column and on the seabed. A single small island, if it qualifies, generates an EEZ of approximately 430,000 square kilometres — an area larger than Germany and Belgium combined, projected from a feature that might be smaller than a football pitch.

The economics are not subtle. An EEZ grants exclusive fishing rights, exclusive rights to seabed minerals, and exclusive rights to any energy resources in the water or beneath it. For a remote island with no inhabitants and no topsoil, the ocean it generates can be worth hundreds of millions annually in fishing licences alone.

But Article 121, paragraph 3, draws a critical line. “Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.” Rocks get only a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea — a fraction of the prize.

The problem is definitional. What counts as “human habitation”? What constitutes “economic life of their own”? The drafters of UNCLOS left this deliberately vague — a diplomatic compromise that has since become one of the most consequential ambiguities in international law. States exploit the vagueness by insisting their rocks are islands. No enforcement mechanism exists to overrule them.

The first serious attempt to draw the line came in 2016. The Philippines brought a case against China before the Permanent Court of Arbitration, challenging Chinese claims in the South China Sea. On 12 July 2016, the tribunal issued its award. Among its most radical findings: none of the high-tide features in the Spratly Islands — not even Itu Aba, the largest, which has fresh water, vegetation, and a Taiwanese garrison — qualified as an island capable of generating an EEZ. The reasoning was strict. Historical evidence of a stable human community was required, not merely the theoretical capacity for habitation. Imported food and externally supplied personnel didn’t count. Economic activity had to be generated by the feature itself, not by state investment in infrastructure.

China rejected the ruling. No enforcement mechanism compels compliance. And every state with a marginal rock-versus-island claim took note: if the tribunal’s logic were applied globally, billions of dollars in maritime entitlements would evaporate overnight.

The 2016 tribunal's reasoning on Article 121(3)

The South China Sea arbitration didn't just rule on the Spratlys — it established a framework that terrifies states with marginal claims everywhere. The tribunal held that island status must rest on historical evidence of habitation, not theoretical capacity. A feature that could sustain people if a government built enough infrastructure is still a rock if nobody ever actually lived there independently. Imported food, externally funded facilities, and rotating government personnel do not establish "human habitation" within the meaning of Article 121. Economic activity must be generated by the feature itself — fisheries worked by residents, agriculture sustained by its own soil — not by state-funded construction projects. The implications reach far beyond the Spratlys. Japan's Okinotorishima has never sustained independent habitation. Its "economic activity" consists entirely of state-funded research. Under the tribunal's logic, it is a rock. Japan has never submitted the question to adjudication. The concrete is, among other things, a bet that it never has to.

The concrete islands

How far will a state go to stay on the right side of Article 121? As far as the mathematics demand.

Okinotorishima — two features called Higashikojima and Kitakojima — sits in the Philippine Sea, 1,740 kilometres from the nearest Japanese city. Japan’s programme of fortification began in 1987, when the Tokyo metropolitan government built the first steel breakwaters; the national government took over and expanded the project through the 1990s with concrete encasements, titanium wave-dispersal netting, and eventually a 100-by-50-metre platform on stilts. The structures are not designed for human use. They are designed for legal survival: the features must remain above water at high tide to qualify as land under UNCLOS. The stakes are simple arithmetic. If Okinotorishima qualifies as an island under Article 121, Japan gains an EEZ of approximately 400,000 square kilometres — larger than Japan’s total land area of 378,000 square kilometres. The radar station, the deepwater pier, the rotating researchers are all there to sustain the legal argument that these features support human habitation. The people are there because the law requires people. Remove the legal incentive and the concrete would be abandoned rubble within a decade.

China, South Korea, and Taiwan dispute the claim. Their argument is pointed: the features are not natural islands but artificial constructions, and UNCLOS does not grant maritime entitlements to man-made structures. Japan’s position is that the concrete preserves a natural feature, not creates one. The distinction matters enormously — it is the difference between a 400,000-square-kilometre EEZ and a 12-nautical-mile circle of territorial sea — and it has never been tested in court. No state with a similarly fortified claim wants to establish the precedent. The ambiguity is, again, the asset.

Twelve thousand kilometres west, a different logic plays out — or rather, doesn’t.

Clipperton Island is a French atoll of 8.9 square kilometres, sitting 1,280 kilometres southwest of Acapulco — closer to Mexico than to any French territory. France won sovereignty through international arbitration in 1931 after a dispute with Mexico dating to the nineteenth century. The atoll generates an EEZ of approximately 435,000 square kilometres, larger than metropolitan France’s entire landmass. France maintains no permanent presence. Nobody lives there. Nobody patrols it.

The result is predictable. Daniel Pauly’s 2009 study for the Sea Around Us Project documented extensive illegal fishing and shark finning in Clipperton’s waters — total harvests estimated at 50,000 metric tons per year, largely uncontrolled because France lacks the naval reach to police an ocean the size of itself on the wrong side of the planet. The enforcement vacuum extends beyond fish. Clipperton sits along Eastern Pacific drug-trafficking routes, closer to cartel territory than to any French naval base, its waters unmonitored by any patrol vessel. Pauly estimated French losses at €0.42 per kilogram of fish taken from its waters — revenue that flows to illegal operators because sovereignty on paper counts for nothing without hulls in the water.

Japan spends hundreds of millions maintaining a presence nobody needs on rocks nobody could inhabit. France claims an ocean it cannot police around an island it does not visit. Both are rational actors within the same system — one that rewards legal entitlement regardless of whether you can back it with physical presence.

The occupation game

Okinotorishima and Clipperton are the extreme cases. They are not outliers. Dozens of states maintain token presences on uninhabited islands for identical reasons, differing only in scale.

The legal foundation predates UNCLOS by a century. The doctrine of effective occupation — rooted in colonial-era international law, articulated most clearly in the 1928 Island of Palmas arbitration by Max Huber — requires a state to demonstrate continuous, peaceful exercise of authority over a territory to maintain sovereignty. Huber’s formulation was blunt: sovereignty is not a right that, once acquired, persists without effort. It must be maintained through visible acts.

For uninhabited islands, this translates into sovereignty theatre. Weather stations. Rotating military or scientific crews. Postage stamps issued for territories with no postal service. Lighthouses tended by no one. Administrative designations applied to rock and water. The substance matters less than the signal: we are here, this is ours, we exercise authority continuously.

Australia’s Heard and McDonald Islands sit roughly 4,000 kilometres southwest of Perth — uninhabited volcanic islands in the sub-Antarctic, reachable only by multi-day sea voyage through some of the roughest water on Earth. They generate an EEZ of 410,722 square kilometres. Australia maintains a research presence and manages a commercially licensed fishery: typically one to three longliners targeting Patagonian toothfish and two to five trawlers for mackerel icefish per season, operating under Australian Fisheries Management Authority permits and monitored by mandatory onboard observers. Patagonian toothfish sells at wholesale for upwards of $20 per kilogram. The causal chain is explicit: research presence underwrites sovereignty claim; sovereignty claim generates EEZ; EEZ generates fishery permits worth millions annually. No research station, no claim. No claim, no fish.

The United States took a different route entirely. Baker, Howland, and Jarvis islands — all uninhabited — sit in the central Pacific. In 1935, the US Department of Commerce settled young Hawaiian men on all three specifically to establish sovereignty claims against Japanese expansion. The operation was conducted in secrecy. These colonists — over 130 men across the programme’s seven years, mostly recent graduates of Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu — lived in extreme isolation on barren atolls, rotating in teams of four or five for three-month stretches, monitoring weather and maintaining a visible American presence on islands that had no other reason to be occupied. On 8 December 1941, Japanese bombers struck Howland, killing colonists Joseph Keliʻihananui and Richard Whaley. The survivors from all three islands were evacuated in early 1942.

The US never resettled them. Instead, it maintained its claims through administrative designation — first under the Guano Islands Act, later through the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, established in 2009 and expanded in 2014. The Howland-Baker EEZ alone covers approximately 425,700 square kilometres — nearly four per cent of the total US EEZ of 11.35 million square kilometres. Sovereignty by paperwork, underwritten by the sacrifice of colonists whose names most Americans have never heard.

Then there is Rockall — a granite stump roughly 300 kilometres west of Scotland’s St Kilda archipelago, jutting 17 metres above the North Atlantic. In 1955, Royal Marines annexed it by landing from a helicopter and cementing a brass plaque to the rock. Parliament incorporated it into the county of Inverness via the Island of Rockall Act 1972. But when the UK ratified UNCLOS in 1997, it conceded that Rockall is a rock under Article 121(3) and cannot generate an EEZ — then redrew its fisheries limits to be measured from St Kilda instead. The concession resolved nothing. Four nations — the UK, Ireland, Denmark via the Faroe Islands, and Iceland — still dispute the surrounding continental shelf rights, determined through a separate legal mechanism: submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. One legal instrument fails; the dispute migrates to another. The claim persists. The rock endures.

What EEZ rights are worth in cold cash

The clearest illustration of the economic stakes comes not from distant powers claiming barren rocks but from small nations leveraging their own maritime geography. The eight members of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement — FSM, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu — collectively control the world's largest skipjack tuna fishery through their combined EEZs. Their Vessel Day Scheme sells individual fishing days to foreign fleets at auction. Revenue to PNA nations from access fees rose from $60 million to nearly $500 million per year by 2016. The total value of tuna caught in PNA waters surpassed $3 billion in 2012 alone. Eight nations, most with minimal landmass, generating billions from the water between them. The ocean is the territory. The land is the receipt.

When the rocks go under

Every argument in the preceding sections rests on a physical assumption UNCLOS never questioned: that the features generating these claims will continue to exist.

They might not.

UNCLOS was drafted in 1982. Its framework for measuring maritime zones — baselines determined by the low-water line along the coast — assumes a stable sea level. The assumption was reasonable at the time. It is no longer reasonable. If a feature submerges, it ceases to be land under the Convention. If it ceases to be land, it generates no maritime zone. The legal architecture of ocean sovereignty, built on rocks and atolls and slivers of coral barely above the tide line, dissolves along with its physical foundation.

For low-lying Pacific atoll nations — Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands — this is existential rather than academic. Their EEZs, generated by atolls barely above sea level, provide the majority of government revenue through fishing licences. Kiribati’s landmass averages less than two metres above sea level. Tuvalu’s highest natural point is 4.6 metres. These are not countries that will be gradually inconvenienced by rising water. They will be erased. And when the land goes, the EEZs — the fishing revenue, the seabed rights, the basis for statehood itself — go with it. Or they did, until the law decided otherwise.

The law has begun to respond — partially, tentatively. In May 2024, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea issued an advisory opinion requested by the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law. But ITLOS addressed environmental obligations under UNCLOS, not the question of maritime baselines. The harder question reached the International Court of Justice. On 23 July 2025, the ICJ delivered its advisory opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change. At paragraph 361, the Court held that states are not obligated under UNCLOS to update their charts or lists of geographical coordinates showing baselines and outer limit lines of their maritime zones, once those have been duly established in conformity with the Convention. At paragraph 363, it stated that the disappearance of one of a state’s constituent elements would not necessarily entail the loss of its statehood.

The practical effect: baselines drawn when features were above water remain valid even as those features erode. Legal commentators on the Columbia Climate Law Blog and EJIL:Talk! have noted the hedged language leaves significant gaps — but the direction is clear. The map is frozen. Draw it now, keep it forever — or at least until someone with standing challenges the fiction.

But the opinion is advisory. It binds no one. And it addresses baseline shift — coastlines retreating gradually — not the more extreme scenario of entire features vanishing beneath the surface. If Okinotorishima’s two rocks disappear despite the concrete, does Japan keep its 400,000 square kilometres of ocean? The ICJ hasn’t answered that. Nobody has. Japan’s expenditure is a bet that the question never gets asked — or that by the time it does, the legal freezing of baselines will have hardened into customary international law, and the physical reality under the water will have become irrelevant.

Bir Tawil will be there long after the concrete crumbles. It sits on bedrock, hundreds of metres above sea level, in a desert getting drier rather than wetter. It will outlast every sub-Antarctic weather station, every coral atoll, every titanium-netted rock in the Philippine Sea. It will outlast the legal fictions those features sustain and the revenue those fictions generate.

And it will remain unclaimed. Not because it is worthless in some absolute sense — 2,060 square kilometres of land is 2,060 square kilometres of land — but because the system that determines which empty territory is worth fighting over has nothing to do with the territory itself. Sovereignty over uninhabited land, in the architecture that now governs the world’s oceans, is not about the land. It is about the projection the land makes into the sea. Bir Tawil projects nothing. The rocks project everything. That is why countries refuse free desert and spend fortunes on concrete — and why the most permanent territory on this list is the one no state will ever want.

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Wichtige Quellen und Referenzen

United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted 10 December 1982, entered into force 16 November 1994. Full text via United Nations Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea.

Philippines v. China, PCA Case No. 2013-19, Award on Merits, Permanent Court of Arbitration, 12 July 2016.

Island of Palmas Case (United States v. Netherlands), Permanent Court of Arbitration, 4 April 1928, arbitrator Max Huber. UN Reports of International Arbitral Awards, Vol. II.

International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, 23 July 2025, Case No. 187.

International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, Advisory Opinion on Climate Change and International Law, Request submitted by the Commission of Small Island States (COSIS), May 2024.

Pauly, Daniel. “The Fisheries Resources of the Clipperton Island EEZ (France).” Sea Around Us Project, Fisheries Centre Research Reports, Vol. 17, No. 5, 2009.

Ryall, Julian. “Japan spends millions building structures on uninhabited rocks 1,740 km from Tokyo to mark its territory.” South China Morning Post, 2 February 2016.

“Japan Is Spending $107 Million to Rebuild a Tiny Pacific Island.” Time, 3 February 2016.

Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Heard Island and McDonald Islands Fishery management arrangements. AFMA, ongoing seasonal reports.

CCAMLR Fishery Reports, Division 58.5.2 (Heard and McDonald Islands).

MarineRegions.org, Flanders Marine Institute. Exclusive Economic Zone data: Clipperton Island (gazetteer ID 8492), Howland-Baker Islands (gazetteer ID 8451).

NOAA, National Ocean Service. US Exclusive Economic Zone extent data.

Heaton, Jeremiah. Reported in Washington Post, July 2014, and subsequent coverage by Time, Slate, and CBS News.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mohyeldeen, Sherif. “The Egypt-Sudan Border: A Story of Unfulfilled Promise,” February 2021.

Columbia Climate Law Blog. “Sea-Level Rise Reaches The Hague: Findings in Relation to the Law of the Sea in the ICJ’s Climate Change Advisory Opinion,” August 2025.

EJIL:Talk! “The World Court on Law of the Sea and Statehood in the Context of Climate Change-Related Sea-Level Rise,” 2025.

Island of Rockall Act 1972, c. 2, Parliament of the United Kingdom.

American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project records. US National Archives; reported in Ka Wai Ola and US Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, August 2002.

Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, Presidential Proclamation 8336 (2009) and Proclamation 9173 (2014).

Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA). “PNA’s Fisheries Management Triples Revenue to Its Pacific Members.” pnatuna.com. Annual fishery reporting.