None of these contested islands amount to much. All of them together add up in terms of territory to no more than three times the size of Central Park in New York City. To make matters even more complicated, there is disagreement about whether some of the “land features” in the sea even count as islands at all in international law or are only “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own.” And “artificial islands, installations, and structures do not possess the status of islands,” and thus do not have legal rights to the waters around them. Yet they can become
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