Page 335 - The Arabian Gulf States_Neat

LAND BOUNDARIES 271
of ihc Government of which he is a national, he shall be deemed to have
committed the offence within the territory of his own Government and shall
be liable to arrest and trial by that Government.
(3) Where an offence, as defined in Article 3 of this Agreement, has been
committed in the Neutral Zone, and offender being a national of one of the
two Governments, escapes into the territory of the other, he shall be deemed
to have committed the offence within the territory of the Government of
which he is a national, and shall be liable to extradition proceedings under
this Agreement.
It is noteworthy that the above article of the agreement does not
expressly provide for the application of the procedure in its para­
graphs 2 and 3 to foreign nationals who commit non-political offences
in the Neutral Zone. One way of solving this problem would be to
subject such foreign nationals, for the purpose of article 8, to the
jurisdiction of the country under whose auspices they had originally
entered the Neutral Zone.1

Joint or separate administration
Problems relating to the administration of the Neutral Zone assumed
greater importance after the granting of the offshore concessions of
1957-8 to the Japanese Arabian Oil Company. Consequently, as a
result of the influx of workers and employees of the oil companies to
the Neutral Zone, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia found it necessary to
hold joint discussions aimed at finding a workable solution for the
administration of the Zone. The two parties, therefore, held a series
of negotiations encompassing the general legal status of the Neutral
Zone and its offshore area. These negotiations were continued, inter­
mittently, until July 1965 when the two parties Anally concluded an
agreement in which they agreed to partition the territory of the Neutral
Zone into two equal parts, with each party annexing to its own terri­
tory one part of the partitioned Zone. The following is a general
description of these developments.
The Period of Negotiations on the Status of the Zone: The flrst impor­
tant round of negotiations on the general problems of the Neutral
Zone took place in 1960, when at the end of that year the two Govern­
ments agreed on the following resolutions: That each country shall
appoint an expert committee which shall draw tentative boundary
lines for the Zone; that the Zone shall, in principle, be divided into
two geographical parts so that one part can be annexed by Kuwait
and the other by Saudi Arabia; and that the question relating to the
ownership of the two islands of Qaru and Umm al-Maradim shall be
temporarily set aside, pending the settlement of the onshore and off­
shore boundaries of the Zone. Then there was a break in the chain of
1 But sec below, p. 273, for the provisions of the 1965 Agreement.