United Nations body to protect undersea communications cables that are crucial for international trade and security holds first meeting
A new body belonging to the United Nations with the remit to protect critical submarine or subsea cables, has held its first virtual meeting.
It was late last month on 29 November 2024 that the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) had announced that an “international panel has been set up to protect undersea communications cables that are crucial for international trade and security.”
The advisory body’s 40 members include government ministers, heads of regulatory authorities, industry executives and senior experts in the field of telecommunication cables from all over the world. The body will meet at least two times a year.
Submarine cables
Subsea cables of course carry the vast bulk (99 percent) of all online data or ‘traffic’, which has prompted growing concern about their vulnerability in the face of the tense geopolitical situation, amid Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
“We’re launching the international advisory body for submarine cable resilience that is an important milestone in protecting our global digital infrastructure, ensuring its resilience and ensuring that it serves well our global economy,” said Tomas Lamanauskas, Deputy Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last month.
“Submarine cables carry around 99 percent of the global internet traffic,” said Lamanauskas. “So, that means that anything we do today in the digital world is dependent on submarine cables, from our emails and text messages to financial transactions, critical government communications, cloud services, social media, our video streaming services, and so on.”
“We see this critical infrastructure is vulnerable to disruptions, from accidental human activity, from natural hazards, from ageing infrastructure,” said Lamanauskas. “We usually identify around 150 -200 faults that occur globally each year, equivalent to about three faults per week.”
It usually takes a few weeks to fix a damaged subsea cable, but this depends on various factors such as the type of break, depth, or weather conditions.
The volcanic eruption in the southern Pacific Ocean triggered by a tsunami in 2022 disconnected Tonga for several weeks. It took nearly 18 months to repair the damage fully.
No mandate to assign blame
“It’s not our role to investigate, to attribute or to determine the issues,” said Lamanauskas at the time. “What we do to help the member states is referring them to the practices that they can use to do that, to apply in this regard.”
“We don’t do the attribution of the causes of the disruptions,” added Lamanauskas last month.
“What our partners, international or some international Cable Protection Committees say is that around 80 percent of the cable disruptions are caused by accidental human activity or natural hazards.”
The new advisory body seeks to improve cable resilience by promoting best practices and principles for all governments and industry players. It is tasked with ensuring the timely deployment and speedy repair of submarine cables, to reduce the risk of damage and enhance the continuity of affected communications.
Baltic sea
On 17 and 18th November, two undersea cables located in northern Europe (in the Baltic sea), were severed in less than 24 hours, prompting concern over potential sabotage.
A Chinese ship (Yi Peng Three) captained by a Russian national is currently being detained and is being monitored by the Danish navy.
An investigation is ongoing in Sweden, Denmark and Germany whether this Chinese freighter deliberately damaged the cables by dropping and dragging its anchor along the seabed for more than 160km (100 miles).
Beijing has denied any involvement, but expressed its readiness to co-operate with Sweden in an investigation.
It comes after The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which carried natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, were damaged in explosions in September 2022.
Then in October 2023, the Balticconnector gas pipeline was extensively damaged, and Finnish investigators recovered a large ship’s anchor near the spot which was linked to another Chinese container vessel.
First meeting
The first virtual meeting took place on 12 December 2024, amid concern there is no current mandate to investigate alleged sabotage.
When asked about the cause of the most recent incident in the Baltic Sea, Lamanauskas reportedly pointed to previous statements that the ITU does not attribute “the causes of the disruptions”, and that most cable damage is caused by human error or natural activity.
The first physical meeting of this UN body is slated to take place during the Submarine Cable Resilience Summit, in late February 2025 in Abuja, Nigeria.