José Antonio de Yturriaga

José Antonio de Yturriaga Barberán was born in Granada on 12 October 1936. He studied law at the University of Seville, graduating in 1958, and always regarded himself as Sevillian by education and at heart.

From 1961 he taught public international law at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he received his doctorate in law with a thesis on the participation of the United Nations in the process of decolonisation, published in 1967.

Yturriaga joined the Spanish diplomatic career and was posted first to Monrovia, Liberia, where he was also accredited to Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Niger, Sierra Leone and Ghana. He then served as consul in Düsseldorf from 1967 to 1970 and later at the embassy in Lisbon. Back in Madrid he worked on air and maritime law, was deputy director general for land, sea and air cooperation, head of the ministry's international legal advisory office and technical secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also advised the United Nations Environment Programme and Intelsat and was a visiting professor at the Hague Academy of International Law in 1978.

As deputy head of the Spanish delegation he attended the United Nations law of the sea negotiations through to 1982 and played a major part in drafting the Spanish text of the Convention on the Law of the Sea.

He was ambassador to Iraq from 1983 to 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war, to Ireland from 1987 to 1991, and Spain's permanent representative to the United Nations and international organisations in Vienna from 1993 to 1996. From 1996 to 1999 he was ambassador to Russia, accredited at the same time to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. His last post was as ambassador on special mission for the law of the sea in 2001 and 2002. In 2002 the Spanish government nominated him for a judgeship at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, but he did not win enough votes.

He was the author of more than twenty books, including Straits Used for International Navigation: A Spanish Perspective (1991) and The International Regime of Fisheries (1993), and wrote widely on Gibraltar, the Treaty of Utrecht, Western Sahara and Ukraine.

In his later years Yturriaga lived in the Los Remedios district of Seville. He was a regular contributor to SevillaInfo from its first days, and its director recalled that even at 90 he walked from his home to the Ateneo de Sevilla in the city centre to present a book, and that he wrote with great clarity, courtesy and humour.

José Antonio de Yturriaga died in Madrid in the early hours of 30 October 2026, aged 90, having turned 90 only weeks earlier. His death was announced the same day by SevillaInfo, where its director Pilar Fuertes wrote that he had died with an article half written and had kept sending contributions until about two weeks before. The cause of death was not made public.

Yturriaga is remembered as one of Spain's foremost experts on the law of the sea, a negotiator of the 1982 Convention and a prolific scholar of international law, as well as an ambassador who represented Spain in Baghdad, Dublin, Vienna and Moscow. He received the Commander's crosses of the Orders of Charles III, Civil Merit and Isabella the Catholic, the Grand Cross of Naval Merit, the French Order of Maritime Merit, an honorary doctorate from Moscow State Linguistic University and a Russian state honour.