Piracy: an old menace re-merges: Stuart McMillan comments on a maritime problem that has grown steadily worse in the last decade.

• Author: McMillan, Stuart

Piracy against ships is an unlikely survivor from times past. The hey-day of piracy was the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sophisticated tracking equipment is now available to governments and to shipping companies. Instant communications, international co-operation -- unprecedented in world history -- among national law enforcement agencies and a willingness by many governments to spend generously on defence equipment would all seem to contribute towards the elimination of piracy against ships. To these has to be added the fact that no country will now officially sanction the practice of piracy to further its own interests, nor deliberately ignore piracy by its own citizens against the citizens or ships of another nation -- attitudes that have not been rigorously upheld throughout history.

Yet piracy has not only survived but is flourishing. In the year 2000 there were 469 attacks -- an increase of 56 per cent on 1999. Going back over the decade the increase in actual and attempted pirate attacks is seen to be even more dramatic: that 469 compared with 107 in 1991. Preliminary figures for 2001 are for about 300 attacks but whether that is a trend will be shown this year.

It will be argued here that the events of 11 September have altered some of the international perceptions of and approaches to various forms of piracy. I will first discuss the nature of modern day piracy, particularly as it applies to South-east Asia. Secondly, I will explain why the events of 11 September are changing international attitudes towards piracy. Lastly I will consider Japan's response to piracy in South-east Asia, which is important both because it is a major maritime regional power dependent on a piracy-prone area and because of its relationship with South-east Asia.

Although pirates have often been shore based, classical piracy has been depicted as occurring on the high seas. It needs to be borne in mind that the area described as the high seas often ran much closer to coastlines than it does now. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) expanded the territorial seas of coastal states, instituted exclusive economic zones, and clarified the status of international straits. The modern pirate is likely to attack a ship at anchor or berthed or, and this applies particularly to South-east Asia, in an international strait. Piracy on the high seas still occurs but is comparatively rare. Sometimes the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) of the International Chambers of Commerce warns ships to stay away from certain coastlines --in effect a warning to favour the high seas rather than coastlines.

Piracy against ships tends to cross national boundaries. The ship attacked may not come from the same country as the ship attacking. The crew of the attacked ship may be of mixed nationalities. The location of the attack may be in international waters, or it may be in the territorial waters or in the ports of a particular country. The country to which the pirates escape may be different from the country in which they carried out their attack. As a crime piracy shares these characteristics with other trans-national crimes such as drug smuggling, people smuggling, arms smuggling and money laundering. These crimes sometimes support one another, a hijacked ship, for example, providing a vessel with which to smuggle people.

Legal point

A legal point should be noted at the outset. Defining what act constitutes piracy presents problems for international law and for legal systems generally. The seafarer who finds his ship boarded by armed men who rob him, threaten him, rob his ship, and perhaps injure him does not need to understand the legal definitions to recognise the activity and the intentions of his attackers. UNCLOS defines piracy as occurring on the high seas or in a place outside the jurisdiction of a state. Because most of the attacks occur within territorial seas or ports they are technically not piracy at all. Legally they are more accurately described as armed robbery at sea. The attack late last year on Sir Peter Blake's Seamaster was on a river, clearly within the jurisdiction of Brazil.

For statistical purposes, the IMB defines piracy without reference to the high seas:

An act of boarding or attempting to board any ship with the intent to commit theft or any other crime and with the intent or capability to use force in the furtherance of that act. In this article I generally rely on that definition. It should also be noted that the statistics may not record all attacks. There are several reasons why ships might not report attacks. One is that it might affect their insurance premiums. Another is that they might be delayed in a port while an investigation is undertaken. In certain ports the delays are...