| With the development of marine technology, the development and utilization of the undersea resources are being faced with enormous challenges. The UCH is suffering an unprecedented threat when people focused on Marine resource contention. The protection of the UCH is the duty and responsibility of the whole world. Recently, the UCH gradually attracted attention, the related ownership, jurisdiction, and the international cooperation mechanism has become the focus of international and domestic legal issues.The UCH includes not only the sinking, also covers the monuments, human residential buildings, sites, etc. It is he treasures of the predecessors, has a great history, culture, art and archaeological value. The UCH is not the main content, is not lost, nor is it a common human inheritance, it should belong to sunken. The sunken is suitable for lost property rules, so it can learn from the civil law real right theory. The law of salvage and the law of finds have been applied to settle disputes over shipwrecks and their cargoes lasts for hundreds of years, so that an unique and complicated regime of law was formed to govern the UCH. For the civil law countries, the underwater cultural heritage is often regarded as res nullius, and thus uses the principle preoccupation. In order to avoid the destruction of the UHC, countries around the world try to legislation or practices in order to realize the further protection of the UHC. For example, the British and the American have excluded from the scope of commercial salvage; the French call it "Marine Cultural Properties", its ownership belongs to the country, citizens have obligations to report their discovery, any conducts of commercial salvage are forbidden. So as Germany, Sweden, Greece and other countries.The international community tried to reach a consensus on how to protect and preserve the UCH. The most significant outcome was the Convention on the Protection of UCH which promulgate in2001. The process of adopting this Convention was complex and difficult, while in order to balance the interests of involved parties, the convention evades some crucial points such as the ownership of UCH. But still, it is, as the first international law focus on protection of UCH, contains quite a few groundbreaking rules. For instance, the preservation in situ of UCH, the principle that UCH shall not be traded, sold, bought, or bartered as commercial goods, precluding the application of the law of salvage and the law of finds to UCH, the regimes of protection in various maritime zones, etc. These rules have positive influence over the protection of UCH. All in all, the adoption of the2001Convention marked an event of great importance to the whole community concerned with the protection of UCH.Underwater cultural heritage can be found in a country’s internal waters, archipelagic waters, territorial sea, it may also be found in the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf and the contiguous zone of international seabed area and high seas, so the ownership of the UCH will be subject to the conditions of "jurisdiction".China is a maritime power with a history of five thousand years of civilization, but the regime of law on protection of UCH is deficient. Destroy and treasure hunting threatened UCH which located in territorial waters and other waters under control. To perfect legal protection mechanism, China should establish the principle of in situ protection, improve the regional protection mechanism; complete the system of findings, realize the multiplication of rewards and punishments measures; introduce private power specification on underwater cultural heritage development standards; strengthen international cooperation, and constantly promote the underwater cultural heritage protection process. |
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