Norway says it never interfered with a legal challenge mounted by Somalia against Kenya over a maritime boundary dispute, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, while speaking generally of the Kenya-Norway ties, used the occasion to clarify his country’s role when Kenya and Somalia fought at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the Indian Ocean border…
The case was decided in October 2021, favouring largely, Somalia’s arguments that there had been no definitive maritime boundary between the two countries, The court ordered a re-demarcation of that boundary, drawing a line between the two sides’ contested flow of the boundary.
But Norway had been involved in the dispute, at one time leading to furious diplomatic protests from Nairobi that accused the Nordic country’s corporates of fueling the legal challenge, “We have no bilateral problems. On the contrary, we have a lot of common concerns about the world and about the neighbourhood,” the Minister told a gathering at the University of Nairobi on Thursday, where he gave a public lecture to mark 60 years of diplomatic relations. Norway had denied any ill role at the time too.
“And I think what we will be speaking about is how we can even further strengthen our cooperation on Sudan, South Sudan, Horn of Africa, DRC, but also on the global arena like UN reform and UN financial or international financial system reform,” he said, Norway’s role had actually begun earlier when a Norwegian diplomat Hans Wilhelm Longva drew up an MoU in 2009 as part of his country’s “technical assistance” to African countries.
