In the darkness, she has crawled from the water’s edge to where the shrubs meet the beach. She flicks sand aside with the two hind flippers under her table-sized shell, digging as deep a hole as she can. Then she lays her eggs.

This olive ridley sea turtle doesn’t know it, but her efforts to migrate and reproduce soon might become a lot less risky. That’s because the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles appears headed for ratification.

The convention would be the first treaty dedicated exclusively to sea turtles, shielding the Americas’ seven threatened and endangered sea-turtle species where they feed, breed and hatch—from Chile to Canada. It also might serve as a model for other regional resource-management accords.

“These animals have no boundaries, so they require an international agreement and enforcement,” says Frank Paladino of Indiana-Purdue University, head of conservation efforts here in Leatherback National Park, on the west coast of Costa Rica.

The plight of the turtle from which this park takes its name helps illustrate why these protection efforts have required a multilateral approach.

Traveling up to 1,000 miles a year, the leatherback mates near Panama, feeds near Nicaragua and returns here to lay eggs. But only 127 arrived to nest in the September-to-March season this year, down from approximately 200 annually in the early 1980s.

Just up the beach from the olive ridley nesting area, some leatherback hatchlings poke their heads out of the sand and crawl towards the surf. They have survived the robbers who plunder nests in Costa Rica, as in other Latin American countries, to gather eggs for the black market.

But in the nearby woods gleam the eyes of a raccoon ready to feast on the bite-sized babies. And electric lights from development close to the beach confuse the turtles, drawing some away from the sea and toward the predators.

If they reach the relative safety of the water, some turtles eventually eat or become entangled in floating trash. And perhaps the biggest threat, shrimp nets, drown about 150,000 sea turtles each year, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Only 5% of hatchlings that reach the ocean live long enough to reproduce.

The convention’s main feature is a requirement that fishing boats use turtle excluder devices, or TEDs—essentially trap doors that allow captured turtles to slip out of fishing nets. According to Paladino, shrimpers have come to recognize the need for TEDs.

“It’s not like these guys want to catch [sea turtles],” he says. “There isn’t a commercial market for turtle meat. They’re being needlessly wasted.”

U.S. shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico have used TEDs for a decade to comply with a federal law that inspired the convention. And shrimp fleets in several Latin American nations have installed the devices to meet U.S. import-certification requirements.

But last year, international opposition to U.S. bans on shrimp imports from countries that fail to meet those requirements prompted a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against the United States. The WTO ruled the U.S. must modify its trade law or compensate plaintiffs.

In the wake of that decision, the sea turtle convention is seen as an important means of promoting TEDs through voluntary enforcement.

“The convention is more effective than unilateral action and trying to strong-arm other countries,” says David Nitchman, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, a U.S. fishing trade association based in Arlington, Virginia.

Brian Hallman, deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Marine Conservation and head of the U.S. delegation in the treaty talks, agrees.

“It’s quite unusual. I don’t know of anyone who’s opposed this treaty,” he says. “Most conventions don’t have teeth per se, but we fully expect that countries will live up to their obligations.”

However, Randall Arauz, of the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute’s Sea Turtle Restoration project, says it’s by no means clear whether the treaty will be implemented in earnest.

“It could be relevant, but it’s going to take a lot of activism,” he says. “Otherwise, it’ll be just another treaty.”

Still, Arauz is pleased with the breadth of the treaty and its implications for the ecosystems sea turtles visit each year. “In protecting them we can protect the whole marine environment,” he says.

Arauz is based in Costa Rica, where he has completed several projects to teach fishermen how to use TEDs. He says that properly used, the $200 devices cause very little loss in overall catches. Instead, they shunt aside the heavy debris—and sea turtles—that might otherwise become entangled in the nets. U.S. government studies support his findings.

For their part, U.S. shrimpers are happy to see a treaty that encourages their foreign competitors to follow the same rules they do, according to Hallman. Ratification of the convention, he says, would “level the playing field for our (U.S.) fishermen.”

A total of 12 countries met a Dec. 31 deadline for signing an agreement to send the convention to their respective legislatures for ratification—Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Peru, the United State, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Ratification by eight countries is required for the treaty to take effect. Although no deadline has been set for crossing that threshold, Venezuela already has ratified the treaty and Costa Rica, Mexico and the United States are expected to follow suit soon.