Modern Piracy and International Law: Definitional Issues with the Law of the Sea

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, piracy, particularly off the coasts of Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa, has become a major problem for global shipping and maritime safety. Piracy is an international problem, as it takes place outside state jurisdiction and affects the nationals of many states. Yet international law has proven unable to provide a framework for an effective solution to this problem. This is due in part to two main flaws in the treatment of piracy under the major document in international law, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These two problems relate to the definition of the act, limiting piracy to events on the high seas caused for private ends between two ships, and the universal jurisdiction granted over it. The policy and scholarly communities have proposed many emendations of international law to better suit the reality of modern day piracy, but as yet none of these have gained any traction. Piracy continues to grow and alter in response to state actions, and it is too soon to tell whether any of the recent anti‐piracy initiatives will have the appropriate effect.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.