Indonesia will seek to prove it has legal and exclusive rights to waters beyond 200 nautical miles north of Papua province when it makes its case at the United Nations this week in a bid to expand its territory in search of potential mineral reserves. Having submitted its claim over an extended continental shelf area to the UN Commission on the Limit of the Continental Shelf (UNCLCS) in April last year, the government will make its case at a hearing with the UN body in New York, the United States, this Wednesday. According to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the continental shelf is an area of the seabed and any layer of subsoil underneath the water column where a country could exercise its sovereign right to explore and exploit natural and biological resources. Countries have the right to extend their continental shelf border beyond the prescribed 200 naut...