Piracy

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Breaking News from 1932: Pirate Facilitators Must Be Physically Present on the High Seas

September 19, 2012

Jon Bellish is a Project Officer at the Oceans Beyond Piracy project outside Denver, Colorado (though all of his views are his own). He has experience in United States piracy trials and just got on Twitter. In the two years since the United States Justice Department began prosecuting Somalis for their alleged roles as pirate hostage negotiators, a debate has emerged as to whether UNCLOS requires facilitators of piracy to be physically present on the high seas in order to have committed piracy jure gentium and thus be subject to universal jurisdiction. Highly reputable scholars and jurists have come out on different sides of this debate, due in large part to a lack of context surrounding UNCLOS art. 101, which provides the definition of piracy. Professor Douglas Guilfoyle takes the more expansive view that facilitation can take place within the jurisdiction of a state because UNCLOS art. 101(c), the section concerning facilitation, does not contain an explicit high seas limitation, as does art. 101(a)(1), which deals with the direct…

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Committing Piracy on Dry Land: Liability for Facilitating Piracy

July 26, 2012

An important case before US Courts at present is US v Ali, where the defendant is accused of, among other offences, aiding and abetting piracy by acting as an interpreter. (See the ruling on a preliminary motion here.) The case clearly has implications for other facilitators of piracy, such as financiers and the bosses of pirate gangs.

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Shooting fishermen mistaken for pirates: jurisdiction, immunity and State responsibility

March 2, 2012

Francesco Messineo referred below to the incident in which Italian marines, embarked aboard an oil tanker to protect it, appear to have killed two Indian fishermen mistaking them for pirates. There has been a lively debate about how best to manage armed security for vessels transiting the high-risk piracy area off Somalia. The two…

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Briefly Noted: New Report on Somali Piracy

January 12, 2012

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee released its report on Somali piracy on 5 January 2012.* I acted as a specialist advisor to the committee, so I will not offer a full analysis but simply highlight some points of interest: the report is critical of the failure to contain piracy in the Indian Ocean;…

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Kenya Invades Somalia Invoking the Right of Self-Defence

October 18, 2011

Vidan Hadzi-Vidanovic is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nottingham School of Law. At a press conference held in Nairobi on 15 October 2011, the Kenyan ministers of defence and interior announced that Kenyan security forces will engage in military operations against the Al-Shabaab militants in Somali territory. They invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter as a…

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