Disputed river boundaries - cases where a river changed its course

[Vítor Gaspar]

Good night.

I'm working on a project where I have to defend country A against country B on the sovereignty of a small patch of territory that belonged to country B, as it was on the left bank of the said river (and a treaty that expressed "all territories on the left bank of the river belong to B" was/is in effect), but then, for geological reasons (an earthquake), the river changed its course, effectively making the disputed territory lie on the river's right bank.

Country A occupied said territory and now says it belongs to them.

Surreal as it may sound, does any one know of cases that are remotely connected to this one?

[Watercress]

A brief google search tells me, no.

[Vítor Gaspar]

Then again for countless times I looked up for some things in Google and, even though they happened/existed, I didn't manage to find them. Hence why I'm asking if anybody knows about it.

[The Dude]

I guess there's no better country for this type of dispute than Gambia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambia

The country's border has been very strictly defined by the British and the French in accordance with the run of the river after which the country is named, as the country is effectively nothing more than a river with its banks. Maybe they would have some sort of border dispute with Senegal arising from this, though the Wiki doesn't seem to mention any.

[Dr. Croccer]

I'm pretty sure that Suriname has a disputed border based on dubious knowledge of river boundaries.

[Sphere]

Part of Kentucky got sliced off when the Missouri river changed course.

[Adar]

The border between Sweden and Finland is defined as the deepest section of Torneälv. This mean that every 25 years a revision is made to adjust for changes in the river bed.

The latest revision was made in 2006 and confirmed as law in 2009.

You can find the Swedish version of the law here: http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/Debatter-...U8&doctype=bet

And a video from the debate here: http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/Debatter-...U8&doctype=bet

The debate is really short and consists of one guy saying how nice it is that Sweden and Finland cooperate, then the law is passed.

[YuriVII]

Look into disagreements between USSR/Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China over their borders on the Ussuri and Amur river. The situation is not an exact parallel but could give you some ideas.

Country B occupied your lands? Well go kick em out!

[Condottiere 40K]

There are two possibilities; act of God, and man-made. Man-made could be seen as an aggressive act.

Borders aren't just placed through the middle of waterways for convenient geographical barriers to define borders and defensive buffer zones, they also there to allocate space for shipping, as rivers tend to be used as transport networks.

[CiviC]

There is dispute on Danube between Romania and Ukraine over one little island. The treaty says the border is on the middle of main navigable channel. The Maican Island was on the south of this channel and it belonged to Ukraine, but now the navigable channel moved to the north of the island so the island should belong to Romania. Ukraine doesn't want to recognise this change.

[ShockBlast]

Both countries are correct,let me elaborate.

Country A is right,from a moral point of view if we can name it like that, because if you look at the total number of Km² the country is smaller.

Country B is right from a legal point of view,the river defines the border thus all the new land belongs to it unless there is an if in the treaty regarding the shifting of the river.

You picked the wrong country to defend unless there is an if in the treaty.The best course of action would have been to put political pressure on then to change the treaty to include a clause concerning the shifting nature of geographic markers.

The press can be a powerful tool and the people, in general, would give their support to country A.This way the attention of a powerful global entity could be attracted,a UN Council Seat owner to be preferred, to put pressure on country B to redraw the border and include a paragraph regarding the changing of geographic markers.

The opening post leads to me assume that there is nothing in the border treaty about shifting geographic markers so country A ,by invading country B, ed up royally.They invaded the sovereign territory of country B whom they have no legal right over as per their border treaty they have with country B.They might have had a moral reason but the influence it carried vanished when they invaded.

By contrast country B now enjoys lot of international favour for being invaded and having a part of it`s territory,which they have legal claim over, taken over by an aggressive neighbour with no legal right over that land.

Country A can expect embargoes and other "gifts" from the rest of the world.