Saudi Oil and Pirates

In November 2008, Somali pirates hijacked a supertanker hundreds of miles off the Horn of Africa, seizing the Saudi-owned ship loaded with crude oil.

Despite a number of military efforts to tackle the situation, systematic maritime piracy is growing. The lack of adequate legal instruments only exarcebates the problem.

It is fair to say that no significant international solution has been achieved. At domestic levels, countries have tried to create solutions in the best way possible.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia signed a major maritime code of conduct (the "Djibouti Code") that calls for a revision of national legislation to criminalize sea piracy.

The signing of this agreement is significant in view of the fact that the Kingdom is the world's main oil exporting country. Saudi Arabia's economy is essentially petroleum-based; roughly 75% of budget revenues and 90% of export earnings come from the oil industry. The oil industry comprises about 45% of Saudi Arabia's GDP.

95% of Saudi imports and exports pass through the Kingdom's seaports while sailing across the waters of different countries where pirates are active.

Although the Kingdom's move is to be welcomed, the wider duality of - uncoordinated - responses to piracy (domestic and international) is to be viewed with suspicion. The international nature of commerce requires a centralised and coordinated prophylactic solution to the problem - not mere scattered (and divergent) domestic criminal provisions.

The Code of Conduct only requires signatories to co-operate to the fullest possible extent in the repression of piracy and armed robbery against ships, with a view towards sharing and reporting relevant information through a system of national focal points and information centres. Each signatory intends to review its national legislation with a view towards ensuring that there are laws in place to criminalize piracy and armed robbery against ships, and adequate guidelines for the exercise of jurisdiction, conduct of investigations, and prosecutions of alleged offenders.

The Code retains some of the shortcomings of the UNCLOS definition of piracy.

The Code is a regional cooperation agreement. It appears to have no real teeth. Or if it does, it will experience many teething problems before it can ever bite.

We have dealt with maritime piracy from a bottom (domestic) up (international) approach. This method is clearly not working. What we really need is an authoritative top-down solution: the promulgation of an international treaty to be implemented in domestic legislatures. The Djibouti Code marks an important shift towards the right direction. But it lacks the strength needed to address a critical issue in international commerce.

Piracy at Sea III

The international commercial system is sick. In medicine, a physician would ideally treat the patient by surgically removing the tumour or eradicating the cause of the disease - failing that, he would treat the symptoms in the hope that the patient will eventually recover. Or he could do a mixture of any of those things. The commercial world has opted for a symptomatic treatment policy in the adventurous quest for combating piracy at sea. It naively believes that it can treat the symptoms of this commercial infection by merely sending more military ships to the coast off Somalia. But such a move is clearly bound to fail. In plumbing, you don't fix a leak by bucketing it in a cup, emptying it, and robotically starting the process all over again. You don't need to be an expert in plumbing to know that in such circumstances what you really ought to do is fix the pipe. What the international community has failed to recognise is that the problem cannot be doctored via sporadic military missions - the remedy does not lie in use of force, but in the use of political reform. Thus, the only way of preventing piracy at sea (at least off the coast of Somalia) is by re-visiting the political, social and economic (frail) architecture of the country. Only by re-engineering its political infrastructure, providing a viable economic direction and developing a stable and reliable social network for its people will Somalia be able to secure its borders and territorial waters. But it cannot do it alone. Maybe the international community can't see the forest for the trees. Or perhaps it can, and is constrained by a political timidity that will only exarcebate an issue that will never sail away, no matter how many military vessels are sent. C'est dommage, but I think that the pirates are here to stay.