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Norway’s supreme court will hear a case involving a Latvian trawler in one of the biggest recent challenges to the Nordic country’s control over natural resources close to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The court will begin to assess from Tuesday whether the trawler needs a Norwegian licence to fish for snow crab in an extended area around Svalbard in a case that will test Oslo’s interpretation of the archipelago’s territorial waters. It is a rare case where Russia’s view is shared by both the EU and UK while Norway stands almost alone in its insistence that only it has rights to the archipelago’s natural resources, including potentially lucrative reserves of oil and gas. “Norway is in a bit of a quandary,” said Pierre-Olivier Savoie, partner at Savoie Laporte law firm in Paris, which is acting for the Latvian trawler in this case and an arbitration hearing pending at the World Bank. He argued that pressure on Norway over Svalbard’s territorial waters is likely to increase whether it wins or loses the current appeal, which unusually will be heard by a full supreme court over the next four days.