A lawyer for one of five suspected Somali pirates being prosecuted in the Netherlands described his client Monday as a modern-day Robin Hood driven by poverty to hijack ships.Danish Navy sailors captured the men after a Jan. 2 attack on the cargo ship Samanyulo in the Gulf of Aden. The ship's crew fended off the pirates with signal flares until the Danish naval ship came to the rescue and sank the pirates' boat ...
At a pretrial hearing in a heavily guarded court in Rotterdam, lawyer Willem Jan Ausma called his client, Ahmed Yusuf, a "Robin Hood."
Speaking to reporters outside court, he said pirates "attack ships of rich countries to give the ransom to poor families."
He later told judges there were different types of pirates operating off Somalia's coast — those who gave ransom money to organized crime gangs and others "who just go to sea in the hope of getting something more than the fish that are no longer there."
Also, because I don't know where else to put it, here's the link to Gwen Thompkins' NPR interview with a Somali pirate.
I'm interested to see under what national law are the pirates are to be tried. Since Somalia has an essentially collapsed government no good there, so do they use the laws of the capturing party? Will it be under International Law, since it is an International offense?
ReplyDeleteAlso, a Robin Hood argument is interesting but ineffective. It leads to a can of worms about what needs to be done about Somalia's status as a failed state, and nobody wants to actually help that variety of nation without collateral.
Yes, piracy is a crime under international law and any ship that is attacked is permitted to defend itself. Because piracy is subject to universal jurisdiction (it is, in fact, one of the oldest crimes to fall under this category), pirates captured in international waters can (under international law) be tried by whichever state has captured them. However, few states have modern national laws against piracy and the expense and difficulty of prosecution acts as a further deterrent, so, as you allude to, prosecutions are rare. Recently, however, Kenya has taken an active role in trying pirates, under agreements with other states and the EU. For more information on the international law aspect of piracy, this site is pretty good: http://www.asil.org/insights090206.cfm
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I would not be so quick to dismiss the rhetorical effectiveness of labeling pirates modern day Robin Hoods. Indeed, pointing to the putative economic necessity of their actions is one of the only defenses of piracy that is likely to have any persuasive teeth at all, given the very long-standing (we're talking pre-Thucydides) international anti-piracy norms. Although it's uncertain how effective the deployment of the Robin Hood allusion will be in a legal setting, it has certainly been used in the popular media (for example here: http://africanpress.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/somalia-robin-hood-pirates-stealing-from-the-rich/). This is similar to the argument we alluded to earlier on the blog here: http://roguishcommonwealth.blogspot.com/2009/04/because-i-do-it-with-petty-ship-i-am.html. The argument that pirates are modern-day Robin Hoods does raise questions about how the political and economic conditions of Somalia can be changed, but I don't think this moots the persuasive power of deploying the myth.
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