Source: http://djilp.org/tag/maritime-piracy/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 05:19:06+00:00

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Tag Archive | "maritime piracy"
The media’s coverage of maritime piracy has changed markedly as of late. In 2010, stories characterized piracy as a ballooning problem with pirates’ changing tactics outpacing those of international navies. The result was a marked increase in attacks and hijackings. Today, however, stories are more likely to focus on diminished profits in the insurance industry, languishing pirate villages, or out-of work prostitutes. This change is not unwarranted. Reported incidents of piracy have seen a steady decline from 2010 to 2012, with only 70 incidents attributed to Somalia this year, less than half the number reported during the same period in 2011.
Though industry best management practices and steady international naval support have undoubtedly played a role in piracy’s reported decline, the phenomenon is best explained through the increased use of private maritime security companies (PMSCs) aboard merchant vessels transiting pirate infested waters. These guards are used on anywhere between 30% and 60% of all ships, and over half of 2012’s attempted attacks were carried out on ships with private armed guards. To date, not one pirate attack has been successfully conducted on a ship with armed guards on board.
Yet the picture is not all rosy. These guards operate in a legal grey area where incident reporting is considered to be a matter between the private security company and the shipping company who hired it. Neither of these entities have an incentive to report attacks, as reporting increases potential legal liability and insurance costs. Accordingly, those who believe that all incidents of piracy get reported are few and far between.
From all this, a central themes emerges. It is clear that these guards have had a real impact on piracy, but the full extent and nature of that impact remains obscure. The secrecy inherent in a purely private security scheme devoid of outside political pressure has left the public in the dark as to the true extent of piracy in the Indian Ocean, not to mention the extent to which innocent fishermen are caught in the crossfire.
Considering the identifying characteristics, tactics, and interests of the parties involved suggests some similarities between the way private armed guards report piracy attacks and the way the United States government reports signature drone strikes.
The first thing to know is that it is extremely difficult to distinguish coastal fishermen from pirates. This is true for several discrete and mutually reinforcing reasons. Chief among them is the simple fact that pirates steal fishermen’s boats to use them as pirate skiffs, making the two crafts literally impossible to distinguish. Moreover, Somalia is a country with 870,000 guns, only 1.6% of which are registered. In Somalia, possession of an AK-47 alone does not make someone a pirate. It would not be unusual to find such a weapon aboard a bona fide fishing vessel. Finally, local fishermen have been known to approach large shipping vessels either to catch the fish that are stirred up in the larger vessel’s wake or to protect their nets from being destroyed by the large ships travelling increasingly close to the coastline. Between the similarities in appearance and tactics among pirates and fishermen, distinguishing the two is no small feat.
This possibility of confusion does not change the laws of physics that put the AK-47’s operational range at 300-350 meters. Nor does it change the laws of economics that have led to the AK-47’s ubiquity in the region. These operational realities have led to the reported practice of warning shots being fired when an unidentified skiff is over 500m away from the tanker and more direct fire as the skiff approaches the 300 meter mark.
Taken together, the apparent similarities between fishermen and pirates and the range at which PMSCs engage an approaching skiff creates a significant (but currently un-knowable) possibility of false positives. False positives that look something like this: private armed guards fire at a skiff belonging to fishermen, assuming those fishermen to be pirates. The fishermen then decide that the net they are trying to save or the fish they are trying to catch is not worth risking their lives. The fishermen leave the vicinity of the tanker before a positive identification can be made, and the PMSC either reports the encounter as a pirate attack or does not report it at all.
This dubious reporting practice has led to wild discrepancies in the reported number of civilians killed by drones. Officially, the number of civilians killed in Pakistan is either “in the single digits” or around 30 in a yearlong stretch, depending on which official you ask. Unofficially, the New America Foundation thinks that the number could be as low as 152 and Pakistanbodycount.org says that it could be as high as 2,412.
As with civilians killed by drone strikes, the proportion of incidents attributable to pirates as opposed to fishermen is anyone’s guess. This is because in both areas, the security provider agrees on a tactic and then interprets the outcome in the light most favorable to the provider in the absence of effective outside pressure to use a more rigorous method.
This is not to say that the percentage of false positives is necessarily high – either in the case of pirate attacks or signature strikes. It is just to say that nobody knows what the real numbers are, be they high or low. It is presently impossible to make a credible assumption either way.
Chances are high, however, that the number of times PMSCs have fired upon fishermen in the last two years is more than zero, which is the officially reported statistic. Unless some accountability is brought to bear on the reporting process, it is a safe bet that “probably up to no good” is the standard to which pirates, fishermen, terrorists, and civilians alike will be held.
Jon Bellish is a Project Officer at the Oceans Beyond Piracy Project just outside Denver, CO. All the views expressed are his own. You can follow him on Twitter.
The Supreme Court opened up its October term with a healthy dose of international law in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell. The petitioner, Esther Kiobel, is bringing suit against Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) alleging that the oil company aided and abetted the Nigerian government in committing gross human rights violations in the oil rich Ogoni region of Nigeria.
This is the second time this year that the Court has heard Paul Hoffman’s arguments in favor of the plaintiffs and Kathleen Sullivan’s arguments on behalf of Shell, and maritime piracy played a role in both rounds of arguments.
The first round of Kiobel oral arguments considered whether the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) could be applied to corporations as well as natural persons. There, Justice Breyer evoked the concept of “Pirates, Incorporated” to inquire into whether a rem action against an 18th century pirate could be foreclosed because “Pirates, Inc.,” rather than the individual pirate, owned the property at issue.
In the second round of oral arguments, held yesterday morning, the issue had changed from whether the ATS can be applied to corporations to whether it can be applied extraterritorially. Despite this change of focus, maritime piracy played an even more important substantive role in the second iteration of the Kiobel arguments than the first.
Piracy first came up when Justice Scalia asked Royal Dutch Shell’s attorney, Kathleen Sullivan, whether she believed – as Scalia thought she “must” – that the ATS applied to high seas conduct. She did not. Ms. Sullivan then quickly tried to turn her argument to the Marbois incident concerning an assault on a French diplomat.
But Chief Justice Roberts immediately raised the question of piracy again, noting that “it was the most clear violation of an international norm” at the time of the ATS’s passage.
Ms. Sullivan again attempted to minimize her high seas argument, noting that even if the justices concluded that the ATS reached high seas conduct, it does not extend into the territory of another state. However, she doubled down when she argued that Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain – the last ATS case heard by the Supreme Court – does not foreclose the possibility that the ATS’s reach stops at the high seas, as that opinion stated that piracy might be an area covered by the statute.
As Shell’s attorney, Ms. Sullivan wished to steer clear of the issue of maritime piracy for several reasons. The first is that the Supreme Court explicitly found that the First Congress meant to include piracy as one of three torts available to 18th century ATS plaintiffs. The Supreme Court would likely be reluctant to admit that it was wrong less than a decade after Sosa was handed down.
Second, foreclosing ATS claims that occur on the high seas is the furthest possible extension of the respondents’ argument, one that the majority need not adopt to reach the respondents’ desired verdict.
Finally – and this may have been what Justice Scalia was getting at when he initially posed the question – it is difficult to find an example of an American law that applies on the high seas but not on foreign soil. The presumption against extraterritoriality is purely a creature of Congressional intent, and it seems that Congress rarely distinguishes between the high seas and foreign soil when considering a statute’s extraterritoriality.
If the conservatives on the Supreme Court find the argument that ATS application on the high seas and on another country’s soil rises and falls together persuasive, there is enough historical evidence that the ATS was meant to apply to piracy that more newly-minted universal violations could ride on piracy’s coattails and allow for extraterritorial application of the ATS.
The effect such an opinion would have on pending litigation over a high seas requirement for facilitators of piracy is better saved for another day.
This is cross-posted at Communis Hostis Omnium.
 Depending on the ultimate outcome of pending litigation, a notable exception to this general rule could be, however ironically, 18 USC § 1651, the statute criminalizing piracy.
Somalia has no trouble producing pirates. Between a central government that controls little beyond the capitol city of Mogadishu, an utter lack of economic opportunity for young men, and a 3,025 mile long coastline with access to the world’s busiest shipping corridors, for every Somali pirate captured at sea, there are many more waiting to take his place. Accordingly, one of the most promising means to put an end to this global menace is the prosecution and detention of the financiers of pirate action groups – those benefitting most from lawlessness in the Indian Ocean but never actually setting foot on a boat.
The Eastern District of Virginia and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals are in the process of hearing two separate cases that, taken together, could decide whether or not the United States of America will have any role in the prosecution of these so-called “kingpins” of piracy.
One case, United States v. Shibin, is just beginning the trial phase and is the United States first attempt to prosecute a high level facilitator of piracy. The case concerns Mohammad Saaili Shibin’s role in the hijackings of the M/V Marida Marguerite and the S/V Quest. In both attacks, Shibin’s role was that of translator and hostage negotiator. Shibin was paid between $30,000 and $50,000 for his role in the M/V Marida Marguerite attack but was paid nothing in for his role in the S/V Quest, as all hostages were killed before a ransom could be negotiated. Shibin confessed to his role in both hijackings to American authorities.
At issue is, inter alia, whether Shibin can be charged with Piracy under 18 U.S.C. § 1651, which outlaws “piracy as defined by the law of nations” and carries with it a mandatory life sentence.
Because Judge Robert G. Doumar denied the defendant’s motion to suppress his confessions, it will be difficult for Mr. Shibin to argue that he did not participate in the hijackings in the manner alleged. Instead, his case will rise and fall on the way the Fourth Circuit settles a split on the legal question of whether “piracy as defined by the law of nations” is an evolving or a static concept.
This legal question comes to the Fourth Circuit in the context of a split within the Eastern District of Virginia on two cases with essentially the same set of facts. In both United States v. Said and United States v. Hasan, the defendants set out to plunder a merchant vessel and fired upon what they believed to be such a vessel. In both cases, the would-be pirates were actually firing upon a United States Naval vessel.
In Said, the trial court held that § 1651 should be interpreted in light of the nineteenth century definition of piracy, which included only “robbery at sea.” Because the defendants in Said only fired upon a ship and never actually stole anything, their acts did not rise to the level of piracy.
The cases of United States v. Shibin and United States v. Hasan are therefore inexorably tied to one another. If the Fourth Circuit overrules the Hasan trial court and holds that, for the purposes of § 1651, piracy only includes armed robbery at sea, none of the defendants in Hasan, Said, and Shibin are guilty of a crime under that statute. If it affirms the Hasan trial court’s holding that that the definition of piracy under the law of nations has expanded to include the definition embodied in UNCLOS and the High Seas Convention the result will almost certainly be the opposite. The defendants in Hasan and Said would be guilty of piracy resulting from acts of violence on the high seas, and Mohammad Saaili Shibin would be guilty of intentionally facilitating piracy. Though Shibin, as a translator and hostage negotiator, would be considered a mid-level pirate at best, the same legal reasoning that applies to him will apply to higher level facilitators who “incit[e] or . . . intentionally facilitat[e]” piracy but do not themselves commit robbery at sea.
An interpretation of § 1651 as embodying an evolving definition of piracy would make the United States an excellent venue to prosecute the financiers and facilitators of piracy, as the level of due process afforded to the defendants would be unassailable and the mandatory life sentence imposed by § 1651 would be a strong deterrent. Prosecuting these “kingpins” is, apart from solving Somalia’s broader governance problems, the surest way to put an end to maritime piracy in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Seas. Hopefully the American judicial system can adapt to this modern realities of maritime piracy.
This view is understandable when observed through the lens of treaty law whereby implementing legislation is a necessary prerequisite to application within a municipal system. But the international law of piracy has also been accepted as customary law. For example, the 2010 Digest of US Practice in International Law, though noting the U.S. has not signed or ratified UNCLOS, states, “the actions and statements of the Executive Branch over more than six decades reflect the consistent U.S. view that this definition [of piracy in Article 101 of UNCLOS] is both reflective of customary international law and universally accepted by states.” Furthermore, each of the UN Security Council resolutions on piracy in Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea have emphasized that the only definition for the crime of piracy in international law is the one set forth in UNCLOS to which 162 states are states parties. UNCLOS has codified the customary international law of piracy.
Considering the law of piracy is settled both in treaty as well as customary law, is it possible that it is directly applicable in municipal systems without the need for implementing legislation? Some states accept that international law, especially with regard to jus cogens or very serious crimes (such as crimes against humanity and war crimes), applies directly within that state without the need to pass such legislation. With regard to piracy, whether or not it may apply directly would appear to hinge on a number of factors, including the gravity of the offence, whether there is a duty to prosecute in international law, whether the applicable treaties are self-executing, and the nature of a municipal system as monist or dualist. (Ward N. Ferdinandusse’s study is particularly helpful on this point.) Direct application of international law is not without precedent in African states, but will obviously need to be addressed on a case by case basis. To cite but one intriguing example, the 2010 Kenyan Constitution provides in Article 2 that the general rules of international law shall form part of the law of Kenya and that any treaty or convention ratified by Kenya shall form part of the law of Kenya under the Constitution.
The somewhat academic question of the indirect or direct application of international legal norms may not have been addressed by many African states confronted with piracy. Therefore, in the absence of clarity on this issue, the least risky practice would be to assume there is no direct application and insist on the codification of the legal definition of piracy in municipal law prior to instituting any prosecution. Indeed this seems to be the strategy adopted by the UN Security Council Resolutions on the issue. Is it, nonetheless, possible that the international law of piracy is directly applicable in certain African states, thereby rendering criminalization in positive law superfluous? The answer could have important ramifications for prosecutions in states without anti-piracy legislation or in those with incomplete legislative frameworks.
News Post: Somali Piracy: A Continuing Problem?
Last week, U.S. Navy seals rescued Poul Hagen Thisted and Jessica Buchanan, after being held hostage in Somalia for three months. Jon Huggins, director of the Oceans Beyond Piracy Project at One Earth Future, questioned why the US, thousands of miles away, was left to conduct this rescue. In short, the US has the means to conduct such an operation, and Somalia does not have the resources to fight piracy on its own. Despite the successful rescue of these aid workers, an international effort will be necessary to make any long-term progress with this problem.
Some, however, see this rescue as a potential turning point in the long “war” against piracy. This accomplishment may show pirates that the international community is willing to take action against what has practically become the norm. So far, efforts such as increased and more aggressive naval patrols seem to be helping reduce some piracy. The EU Naval Force reported that in 2010, 47 ships were hijacked, and in 2011, the number was down to 25. At the same time, the realization that there are increased efforts to combat piracy may cause pirates to develop new tactics and become more aggressive to counteract those increased efforts. Land-based kidnappings, such as those of Thisted and Buchanan, may evidence these changing tactics. The incentive to kidnap foreigners remains as high as ever, with $147 million paid for ransoms in 2011 alone.
As long as piracy is producing such lucrative ransom payments, it is unlikely that the problem will abate. Although many governments make paying ransom illegal, it is often “the most efficient way to deal with piracy.” In fact, prosecuting those who pay ransom is unlikely to prevent ship owners from continuing to do so. In addition, such prosecution is unlikely to help counteract the problem in the long-term. Some advocate for continued naval patrols as well as holding trials for suspected pirates within the region that these crimes take place. Others, such as shipping operators and insurers, support the use of armed guards aboard ships. Some countries, including the US, have passed laws permitting such action. Each country is able to make its own laws on this issue under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, where every ship is subject to the jurisdiction of the country whose flag it carries. Despite the existence of such laws, this is currently considered to be a highly controversial solution.
Although some feel that the international community is starting to make headway with the problem of piracy, many of the implemented and proposed solutions are likely to bring about new problems in this fight. Piracy will likely continue to flourish as long as the pirates can respond to the efforts with new tactics. In addition, until the international community can truly pull together and create a unified response, it will be very difficult to successfully combat piracy.

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