Piracy and the Law

For those of you who did not catch Amitai Etzioni's essay yesterday:

The main reason pirates roam freely is only whispered in the corridors of power, because it is very politically incorrect to openly state that pirates are protected by a radical interpretation of human rights. The various navies involved are operating (or more precisely, are not operating) because of one or more of the following points:

• Do not capture the pirates because if you do, they will have to be brought to trial in some national court. There are no international courts in which they can be tried. To try them, you will need evidence that will hold up in such courts. Most ship hands do not have the kind of police training needed to collect evidence properly, observe the chain of evidence, and so on.

• Once brought to your homeland, the pirates may seek--and possibly be granted--asylum. (In several European countries one can gain asylum by showing that he or she is coming from a part of the world in which there is a sufficient level of indiscriminant violence that one's life would be in danger by remaining there. One need not show that he or she was specifically persecuted.) Thus, courts may let them walk and you would then have dozens of Somali marauders roaming free in your country.

• You will be unable to ship them back to Somalia for trial because there they would likely be subject to torture or execution.

• Piracy is a crime and crimes are a matter for the police to deal with, not armed forces. But national police forces have no jurisdiction, a high seas catch-22. Pirates cannot be shot when they close in on your ship because they may be fishermen engaging in their peaceful business. The fact that they are armed cannot be used as evidence because in these parts of the world practically all men are armed.

• If you fail to respect their rights, you may be hauled in front of one or more of your national courts, the European Court of Human Rights, condemned by United Nations, and excoriated by the parts of the media and by human rights activists.

Our political class have largely abandoned their responsibility to protect the interests of their own people. It has forgotten that the reason we established the concept of rights actionable against the government is that we wanted them for ourselves, not that we wanted to grant them to the rest of the world. They have further forgotten that such a regime is suitable only to the character of a people who are fundamentally law-abiding. Just because we can afford to grant ourselves these immunities does not mean they are appropriate for peoples of a decidedly different character.