Bogotá Declaration

The Bogotá Declaration was issued on 3 December 1976 by eight equatorial countries — Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Congo, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Kenya, Uganda, and Indonesia — meeting in Bogotá, Colombia. The signatories asserted that the segments of the geostationary orbit (GEO) lying approximately 35,786 km above their equatorial territories were a "scarce natural resource" forming part of their sovereign territory, rather than part of outer space.

The declaration was a direct challenge to the prevailing legal regime established by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, whose Article II prohibits national appropriation of outer space "by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." The equatorial states argued that because the geostationary orbit only exists as a physical phenomenon due to Earth's gravitational field above the equator, it was not "outer space" in the ordinary sense and that the Outer Space Treaty's non-appropriation principle therefore did not apply.

The signatories were motivated by concern that early-arriving spacefaring powers — chiefly the United States and the Soviet Union — would saturate the limited number of usable GEO slots before developing countries could access them. They sought either sovereignty or, at minimum, preferential allocation rights and prior consent for satellites operating above their territory.

The claim was overwhelmingly rejected by spacefaring states and has not been recognized in international law. Slot and frequency allocation in GEO is instead managed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) through its Radio Regulations, which since the 1980s have incorporated equitable access principles partly in response to developing-country concerns. The declaration remains historically important as an early articulation of space equity arguments now revived in debates over orbital debris, megaconstellations, and lunar resource use.