It can be argued with a certain amount of justification that the application
of equidistance for the delimitation of its lateral boundaries extending into the
Timor Sea is disadvantageous for East Timor. This is because the configura-tion of adjacent coastlines—specifically the coast of Indonesian West Timor to
the west and the alignment of the Indonesian islands located to the east—
serves to ‘squeeze’ East Timor’s maritime entitlement. This is illustrated
by the fact that while East Timor’s coastal front amounts to approximately
140 nautical miles, the lateral lines of equidistance are only around 120 nau-tical miles apart where they intersect with the median line between opposite
coasts in the central Timor Sea