In 1994, following the breakdown of negotiations to revise the Canada-United States Pacific Salmon Treaty, Canada imposed a fee of $1500 Canadian on all U.S. commercial fishing boats transiting Canada's Inside Passage between Washington and southeast Alaska. The attempted revisions to the Treaty concerned an effort by the parties to create a meaningful conservation regime that would allot to all parties an equitable catch of Pacific salmon, while allowing many endangered salmon stocks the chance to recover from overfishing. The Inside Passage transit fee lasted eighteen days during which roughly three hundred U.S. boats were made to pay the fee. The transit fee violated many provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In particular, the fee violated the right of innocent passage afforded to vessels travelling through waterways like the Canadian Inside Passage. In addition, the fee violated transit guarantees under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). However, international law is not composed only of treaty law but also includes uncodified international norms and customs--customary international law. This customary international law is often forged in the crucible of international disputes. How states behave and what behavior is considered acceptable by other members of the international community create much of the corpus of customary international law. This Article's examination of the international dispute over the Inside Passage fee will cast light on the emerging customary international law doctrine of lawful, nonforcible countermeasures. Countermeasures may serve to legitimate a state's otherwise illegal breach of international law. However, unlike common law justification, international law justification has not been codified in any international treaty or convention. Rather, it is an emerging and debated norm of customary international law. Hence, examinations of international disputes in which countermeasures are used can illuminate the doctrine of countermeasures. Every resort to a countermeasure within a dispute helps to define the boundaries of that doctrine. This Article will argue that the Canadian Inside Passage transit fee can be characterized as a countermeasure. When so characterized, the transit fee should not be considered illegal under international law, even though the imposition of such a fee violated many of Canada's treaty obligations. In addition, because the Inside Passage fee is a concrete example of a countermeasure, an examination of the fee can help illuminate this emerging doctrine of customary international law. The Pacific salmon dispute involves competing claims and conservation plans for the salmon in the region. This Article will primarily explore the actions of the parties involved in one of the more serious manifestations of this ongoing dispute, the Canadian Inside Passage transit fee. The Article will not examine the complex questions surrounding the merits of the parties' underlying claims, namely, who is entitled to the disputed salmon; rather, the Article will focus on the recent countermeasures employed by the two parties. In addition, this Article will focus on the parties' individual actions and not on the many complex negotiations involved in this dispute. Part II of this Article will describe the history of the dispute, recent developments, and the parties' individual perspectives. Part III will examine the legality of the fee under international treaty law and under the emerging doctrine of countermeasures
