Canadians lawyers learned Tuesday just how wide-ranging modern piracy is - and how hard it is to prevent, writes Richard Foot
By Richard Foot, Postmedia News
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Instead they were decked out in Gucci watches and ill-fitting Armani suits, claiming to be Somali fishermen aboard a small, open-decked skiff Waddell and his crew confronted in the treacherous seas off the Horn of Africa.
"I'm not sure why they considered that pirate attire," said Waddell, who in 2009 commanded the frigate HMCS Fredericton on one of Canada's first anti-piracy naval missions to the region. A Canadian boarding party confronted the skiff, confiscated guns and gasoline from the group, and sent them back to the Somali coast.
"That's the reality of anti-piracy operations off Somalia," Waddell told an audience of lawyers with the Canadian Bar Association on Tuesday.
He and other experts, who spoke at the bar's annual meeting in Halifax, say piracy is a serious, resurgent security issue that threatens the economies of all trading nations, including Canada. Worse, solutions to the problem remain far from clear.
Among the thorny questions facing maritime and military lawyers is how modern-day pirates should be treated by Canadian forces and other state authorities: Are they criminals or foreign combatants?
Can naval crews legally detain them, and if so, should they be accorded prisoner-of-war rights under the Geneva Convention? What about child pirates in the service of a pirate warlord? Once pirates are arrested, should they be brought for prosecution back to Canada, where a pirate might make a refugee claim?
"Off the Horn of Africa, nine out of 10 pirates captured are released, because no state is willing to prosecute them," says Simon Barker, an Ontario lawyer who specializes in admiralty law.
Pirates increasingly threaten commercial shipping in the South China Sea, off the coast of Nigeria, in the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean off Somalia. The UN's International Maritime Bureau (IMB) says there were 489 pirate attacks around the world in 2010, a 20-per-cent increase over 2009. So far this year, there have been 310 attacks, plus 487 crewmen taken hostage and seven crew killed by pirates.
The U.S.-based One Earth Future Foundation says the total costs of piracy to the global economy - factoring in lost cargoes, paid ransoms and piracy-insurance fees - are as much as $12 billion U.S. per year.
Mukundan says that while NATO and other naval forces from China, Russia and India are mounting serious efforts to patrol dangerous seas, pirates are simply growing bolder.
He says there has been a rapid rise in oil tanker hijackings this year off the coast of Benin, where pirates are siphoning off entire oil cargoes into smaller vessels, and then ransoming off crews for millions of dollars.
Source: Ottawa Citizen