Again, the claim "Great Britain has never formally recognized Sealand's independence, but as affirmed by several decisions by British courts and government agencies, Sealand enjoys a de facto sovereignty" isn't true. The United Kingdom recognized it as outside their territorial jurisdiction prior to their extension of territorial waters to 12 nautical miles. Since then it has been under UK jurisdiction. If there has been no official UK pronouncement to that effect (beyond the one concerning the extension of the territorial sea) with respect to Sealand, it is simply because the UK government and courts regard Bates as a kook and choose to ignore him.
And I could go on... -- SJK
There's a lot of precedent on the extension-of-waters front which favors Sealand. When the treaty was signed, this issue came up repeatedly. Otherwise, neighboring countries could claim the territory of others.
Sealand being of artificial construction is unique also, since it was constructed illegally by a third party (UK) during WW2, for a purpose other than land extension. Sealand existed and was a country long before the relevant UN treaties on artificial structures in the sea. Several promiment law professors have basically said Sealand's status as land is the same as reclaimed land in Holland or elsewhere. I can include hypertext links to these documents.
I'll include a summary of the legal issues in another edit of the article (and re-edit the HavenCo article to be a bit more factual; I just cut and pasted quickly to get something up) -- Ryan Lackey
How was the UK construction of it illegal?
Secondly, even if you are correct in stating Roughs Tower as being territory, that doesn't make Sealand a state. Merely claiming unoccupied territory is not sufficent to bring a new state into existence. At the very least it needs to comply with the Montevideo convention criteria, and likely needs to be recognized by other states as well.
And the extension of waters argument only works if Sealand is a state. -- SJK
The UN has repeatedly upheld the right of self determination of "dependent territory" non-self-governing people. If Pitcairn wanted to become independent, they would 1) have every right to by UN agreements 2) would be encouraged to do so by the UK (there was a white paper circulated by the UK to british dependent territories about ~2 years ago which asked them to do so, since the EU is now trying to force the UK to either give overseas territory British passports or make them independent (perhaps commonwealth, though). I was living on Anguilla, another british dependent territory, at the time, and it was a major issue.
Sealand's claims, regardless of validity, are much more complex than Hutt River, Republic of Texas, etc., even if only due to touching on admiralty/maritime law (which is very complex) and that the issue has now dragged out over nearly 60 years; the laws have actually changed several times in the interim.
There are perhaps 7 major points:
I'll make 1-2 paragraph wiki articles about each topic and then deep-link onto the legal site with original documents.
Even the UK cabinet stuff from ~1968 said the legal situation was entirely likely to go against the UK.
The most accurate/useful article for wikipedia is probably to just make it clear it is under debate, and point out the various issues, and then provide details as to what Sealand is actually like in practice (aside from the sovereignty issue, which is only one aspect)
Secondly, I haven't actually seen the UK cabinet stuff, but you have to distinguish two issues: whether the UK had (or has) jurisdiction over Roughs Tower, and whether the Sealand is a state. They may well have felt they were on shaky legal ground on the first point, but I doubt very much they thought for a moment they'd have a problem on the second. Vitanyi's musings aside, if the issue of "is Sealand a state" came before a British court (or for that matter, just about any other court), what answer do you think they'll give? Its almost certain the answer is no. They'd think "if we let small numbers of private individuals establish new states, absolute anarchy would soon result. There would be new states popping up everywhere." Once they start thinking like that, they will adopt a suitable legal position to support it. (As to the Liberia or Orange Free State or Transvaal arguments, let me simply point out that they occured in a different historical period and involved several orders of magnitude more people than Sealand does.)
There is absolutely never going to be any chance of any court or government in the world formally recognizing Sealand as a state. I'm willing to bet any amount of money on that. -- SJK
If you bet "any amount of money" and can back it up, it's not a problem. I can do exactly what Taiwan did, and pay ~3 small countries (Grenada, etc.) and build nice roads for them, about $50m each, in exchange for recognition. This is cheating, though.
If "is Sealand a state" came up before a British court, I think they would almost certainly try as hard as they possibly could to not answer that question specifically, but to rule on other points. There are many possible avenues for this kind of legal challenge, and the EU human rights legislation only adds to it.
Sealand is more plausible/compatible as a new state than the other "micronations" due to the conditions for establishing Sealand no longer being possible -- the ammendments to the law of the sea in 1982 *specifically* prohibiting such actions in the future. After Sealand was proclaimed, the UK immediately went out and destroyed the other remaining offshore forts left over from the war (there were 6 total), to prevent similar kindso f things. Recognizing Sealand does *not* make it possible to do this again.
This is why AU/NZ send someone every year to many of their strategic uninhabited islands in the pacific, and why the prince of Tonga was so quick to invade when people occupied a reef in his territory.