Nii Allotey Odunton, a mining engineer from Ghana, was the Secretary-General of the International Seabed Authority, serving consecutive four-year terms starting in 2009 and ending in 2017.
[citation needed] Odunton first became associated with the United Nations in 1974, when he and two university colleagues were requested to prepare a paper on resource assessment of the polymetallic nodule deposits in the international sea-bed area to aid the work of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, which was developing an international legal framework for the sea-bed and oceans as a whole.
He later helped prepare background papers for the First Committee of the Conference, which elaborated the sea-bed provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, completed in 1982.
Odunton subsequently (1984–88) held several other positions in the Department, including Chief of the Mineral Resources Section, Ocean Economics and Technology Branch.
As head of this section he was responsible for reports to United Nations meetings on marine mineral resource development.