The Republic of Indonesia as an archipelagic state and also as coastal state
which has many outer island bordering directly with neighboring country.
The territory around that outer islands is being used by indonesian
traditional fisher in order to earn living for their family lifes. One of the
Indonesian outer island which is until now, the legal status has still been
uncleared namely Ashmore Reef (The Sand Island) claimed unilaterally by
Australia. Ashmore Reef, geographically, is one of the outer island located
in the South of Indonesia territory. The title of this paper is “The validity
of Ashmore Reef legal status by Australia related to Indonesian traditional
fisherman activities based on UNCLOS 1982”. The problem of this paper
how is the validity of Ashmore Reef legal status by Australia related to
Indonesian traditional fisherman activities based on UNCLOS 1982? kind
of legal research used by the writer is normative legal research which
focusing on positive law norm, including the constitution of regulation, in
order to get secondary data consists of primary law material, secondary
law material, and tertiary law material. The method of collecting data used
by writer is literature studies with qualitative method as a method of
analyzing data. The results of this legal writing can be concluded that,
Australia has a strong legal evidence showing Ashmore Reef owned by
Australian Government, this thing can be proved by hand overring
colonial territory by England. On te other side, Indonesian has only
historical evidence showing that traditional fisherman activities in Asmore
Reef existed. The historical evidence is not enough as The Sand Island's
owneship evidence, due to the fact that on the colonial era, Netherland was
not doin administration activity in The Sand Island an according to
Netherland government, The Sand Island is not included in the Netherland
colonies.