Professor II, Scandinavian Institute of Maritime Law, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, Norway; Adjunct Professor (Docent) Department of Law, Åbo Akademi University, Turku/Åbo, Finland. This article is based on a longer text by the author <The EU and Arctic Shipping) published in N. Liu (ed.) The European Union and the Arctic (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden, 2017, forthcoming). All website references are accessed on 30 December 2016.