The Governance Crisis Inside the International Seabed Authority

Ahead of the 31st session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) scheduled to open tomorrow on 9 March 2026, Member States must be alerted to serious governance failures now unfolding within the ISA.

Before examining these developments, it is worth recalling why the International Seabed Authority matters.

Why the International Seabed Authority Matters

Most people have never heard of the ISA. That, in itself, is part of the problem.

The ISA is not technically a United Nations body. It is an autonomous international organization created under Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Yet it operates within the UN ecosystem, reports within the UN system, uses the UN’s administrative justice mechanisms, and is periodically subject to external audit, although those oversight mechanisms have so far appeared strikingly reluctant to confront the deeper governance failures taking place inside the organization.

And what exactly does the ISA govern?

The seabed beyond national jurisdiction. In the language of UNCLOS, the “Area”  or the deep seabed that legally belongs to all humankind. The ISA is the body entrusted with regulating the exploration and potential exploitation of those resources.

ISA decides who who receives exploration licences.

ISA drafts the mining code governing seabed extraction.

ISA controls the pace or potential pause of deep seabed mining.

And the world is deeply divided over what should happen next:

On one side are states and corporate actors pushing to accelerate exploitation, arguing that seabed minerals are essential to the global energy transition.

On the other side are states calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause, warning that deep-sea mining could irreversibly damage ecosystems that science barely understands.

At stake is far more than mining policy. This is a geopolitical struggle over resource security, environmental risk, North-South equity, and control over the last remaining global commons.

The ISA sits directly at the centre of that fracture line. Which is precisely why governance at the ISA is not some minor administrative matter. It goes to the heart of who ultimately controls access to these global resources and under what rules.

An organization entrusted with administering the “common heritage of mankind” cannot operate with a collapsing internal justice system, budgetary irregularities, and unchecked executive power that expose serious failures in the way the ISA is currently being run.

Last year I published two articles documenting the unlawful acts carried out by the ISA Secretary-General.

Before turning to the serious developments that emerged in 2026, including a damning leaked internal note addressed to the ISA auditors, it is important to briefly recall the headline decisions taken by Secretary-General Letícia Reis de Carvalho since assuming office in January 2025.

Before her election in July 2024, Carvalho presented herself as the reformer who would bring transparency to an institution she suggested had long suffered from opacity.

As she stated in an interview on 4 July 2024:

“For me, the mission of the ISA and the leadership of the ISA is to be a trustee,  an honest broker… It should offer transparency of its own procedures… If you are a trustee of the biggest commons on Earth, you cannot be called obscure or opaque in any way. We absolutely need practices that can turn things from opaqueness to transparency.”

Those promises collapsed almost immediately after she assumed office on 1 January 2025.

The Dismantling of the Internal Justice System

Within her first forty-eight hours, several staff members, many of whom had signed valid fixed-term contracts in December 2024 and had already entered on duty received abrupt termination letters informing them that the ISA would be “unable to complete the onboarding process.” Two additional staff members saw their contracts terminated under the guise of restructuring. These staff members were removed from their posts without reason, due process, or remedy.

As the affected staff filed urgent motions before the Joint Appeals Board (JAB) seeking review of these decisions, the crisis escalated further. The Secretary-General dismantled the entire JAB structure, leaving staff without any functioning internal justice mechanism at the precise moment they needed it. In one of its orders on the Appeals, the United Nations Appeals Tribunal expressly noted in Order No. 2024-591 its:

“concern that the JAB was dismantled temporarily without prior warning given to ISA staff members and with no reasons provided by the Administration,” observing that this had “denied staff members access to justice in the interim” and concluding that “the temporary void rendered meaningless the JAB suspension of action mechanism.”

At the same time the administration dismantled the JAB, the Secretariat moved ahead with recruitment to fill the very posts it had unlawfully vacated effectively foreclosing any realistic possibility of reinstatement before the justice process had even begun.

Five weeks later the Secretary-General appointed a new chair of the reconstituted JAB: Martha Halfeld, a former judge of the United Nations Appeals Tribunal and, significantly, another Brazilian national. The appointment placed a compatriot with appellate judicial experience at the head of the very body responsible for reviewing challenges to the Secretary-General’s own administrative decisions, raising obvious concerns regarding the structural independence of the mechanism. It became increasingly clear that accountability had little place in the new order taking shape inside the Secretariat.

A Damning Note to the ISA Auditors

On 12 February 2026, I, together with more than 200 other recipients, received a detailed internal note addressed to the International Seabed Authority’s external auditors. The document was later published online by Inner City Press.

The Note, which seems to have been written by internal technical experts, is a damning, comprehensive account of what appears to be a total systemic breakdown in the ISA’s governance framework.

The document identifies alleged serious violations touching virtually every pillar of institutional management: unlawful staffing decisions, concealed litigation liabilities, irregular recruitment practices, manipulation of the Assembly-approved staffing table, breakdown of internal financial controls, and extensive misallocation of budgetary resources. 

One of the most immediate concerns relates to the litigation triggered by the Secretary-General’s January 2025 dismissals. More than fifteen employment-related cases have been filed before the Joint Appeals Board and the United Nations Appeals Tribunal. 

The note estimates the ISA’s potential legal exposure at approximately US$2.5 million, yet these liabilities appear not to have been disclosed in the financial statements despite the requirements of international public-sector accounting standards. 

But the most disturbing revelations concern the Joint Appeals Board (JAB) itself.

Until 2025, members of the JAB served without remuneration. After dissolving the existing board, the Secretary-General reconstituted it with new members and introduced a payment scheme that had never been approved by the ISA Assembly.

Under this arrangement:

• the Chair of the JAB receives US$2,000 per case,
• other JAB members receive US$500,
• and the JAB Chair additionally receives a monthly stipend of US$1,000 while cases remain active. 

None of these payments appear in the approved programme budget or the Finance Committee. None were formally authorised by Member States.

The obvious question for auditors is therefore simple: from which budget lines are these payments being financed?

Even more troubling is the structure of the remuneration itself. Because payments continue while cases are “in progress,” the system potentially creates an incentive to prolong litigation rather than resolve it.

The administration that triggered the disputes now finances the tribunal adjudicating them, through a payment mechanism it introduced itself.

Whistleblowers have also shared internal meeting minutes of the newly constituted JAB dated 6 February 2025, which shed further light on how this mechanism was reassembled.

During that introductory meeting, members acknowledged that this would be the first time JAB members would receive remuneration for their services at the ISA, a practice that had not previously existed.

Several members raised concerns about whether the payments had been approved by the Finance Committee and whether Member States had even been informed of the arrangement, noting that such matters would normally require transparency toward the ISA’s governing bodies. At least one member indicated that, because of national regulations governing public officials, they would need to consult their government before accepting any remuneration. The discussion itself suggests that the payment structure had been introduced without the usual institutional clarity regarding authorization or oversight. 

The same meeting also confirmed that several urgent staff cases had already been forced to escalate to the United Nations Appeals Tribunal for interim relief during the transitional period, precisely because no JAB panel existed at the time to review them. 

In other words, the ISA dismantled its internal justice mechanism at the exact moment staff needed it, then reconstructed it under conditions that raised immediate questions even among the newly appointed members.

The note goes on to document more than twenty deviations from the staffing table approved by Member States, including newly created senior posts, unilateral reclassification of positions, tailoring of vacancy annoucements and recruitment carried out outside established procedures. 

Across the Secretariat, vacancy announcements were shortened, positions were filled through consultants performing staff functions, and individuals allegedly closely associated with the Secretary-General were rapidly appointed through processes that appear to have bypassed competitive recruitment.

Restructuring the Secretariat Or Consolidating Power?

The restructuring of the Secretariat was presented as an administrative exercise. In practice, it appears to have served a very different purpose.A recurring concern emerging from the Secretariat’s restructuring is the consolidation of power around the Secretary-General through a pattern of appointments that bypassed established recruitment procedures and favored former colleagues who worked with her at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi during Carvalho’s tenure there between 2019 and early 2025.

Several of the individuals brought into senior roles at the ISA appear to have worked directly with Carvalho at UNEP Nairobi during that period:

• The person appointed as Chef de Cabinet (D-2) on 6 March 2025 previously served as Deputy Director of the Ecosystems Division at UNEP in Nairobi, where he worked in the same division as Carvalho between August 2022 and early 2025. Notably, the previous incumbent of the position (D-1) at ISA was abruptly terminated shortly after Carvalho assumed office. She then reclassified the post to D-2 since the new incumbent was already a D-1. That former staff member currently has several appeals pending before the United Nations Appeals Tribunal.
• Similarly, the Chief of Administrative Services appointed under the new structure also worked at UNEP between 2019 and 2024 as a change management consultant, during the period in which Carvalho held senior leadership roles there.
• Another appointment concerns the Head of Strategic Communications and Global Engagement, hired as a consultant at a level equivalent to P-5, who previously served as Head of Biodiversity Communications at UNEP in Nairobi from 2009 to 2020.
• In addition, an individual who served between November 2021 and January 2025 in communications and partnerships within UNEP’s Marine and Freshwater Branch,  a unit previously headed by Carvalho,  was subsequently appointed to a communications consultancy role at the ISA.
• More concerning is that the former Registrar of the UN Dispute Tribunal in Nairobi which also serviced UNEP has now been appointed as a member of the newly constituted JAB.

Taken together, these appointments raise serious questions about whether the restructuring of the Secretariat has been used not simply to reorganize the institution, but to install a network of trusted former colleagues in key positions while circumventing the competitive recruitment procedures that govern international civil service appointments. The internal note addressed to the ISA auditors suggests that these cases are not isolated but part of a broader pattern of recruitment irregularities that unfolded across the Secretariat during 2025.

The Note document concludes that these practices amount to a systematic override of internal controls.

They are accompanied by allegations of payroll irregularities, improper payment of expatriate benefits to staff working remotely outside the duty station, misallocation of expenditure across budget lines, and the effective collapse of the segregation of financial control functions within the Secretariat. 

At one point in 2025, a single official appears to have exercised responsibility for budget management, finance, and internal oversight simultaneously,  a concentration of control that any basic public-sector audit framework would immediately flag as a governance red alert. 

The ISA Secretariat no longer appears to be operating within the basic guardrails of public financial management which it publishes on its own website.

Budget appropriations, which are legally authorised by Member States  appear to have been treated less as binding authorisations and more as flexible pools of funding to be rearranged after the fact.

When staff members of an international organization reach the point of repeatedly leaking internal documents, compiling detailed technical notes for external auditors, and attempting through every available channel to alert oversight bodies to what is happening inside their institution, it is rarely an act of opportunism.

More often, it reflects a last attempt to protect the organization itself when normal internal safeguards have failed. The level of detail contained in the note addressed to the ISA auditors strongly suggests that it was prepared by individuals with deep technical knowledge of the Authority’s internal operations who appear to be trying, in their own way, to prevent further institutional damage.

Member States cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the financial, administrative, and legal disorder now unfolding inside the Secretariat. At some point, the responsibility for restoring order does not lie with staff struggling to expose the problem, but with the governments that created the institution in the first place.

Institutions rarely benefit from ignoring the warnings of the people who know their internal workings best.

During her opening remarks to the Legal and Technical Commission on 23 February 2026, the Secretary-General declared that:

“Governance must guide activity, not follow it.”

At the International Seabed Authority today, the opposite seems to be the case: governance is left scrambling to catch up with arbitrary decisions that have already been taken. 

In other words, decide first and worry about governance later.