Something people have to remember about crimes at sea and piracy in particular is that it goes back to some OLD treaties among nations. Countries realized that nobody could really claim the whole ocean, everyone wanted to use it, so they worked out treaties on how that would go, including on crime ws handled.
Well piracy in particular was a real problem during the age of sail and so they started to get pretty harsh about it and one of those things is the whole "universal crime" thing. The countries decided that if you caught pirates, it didn't matter where they were from (it could easily be a mixed crew), which nation they were pretending to be flagged under, or the flag of the ship that they were attacking: Anyone had jurisdiction to respond to it.
So you could have pirates pretending to be a Spanish ship, attacking a Dutch ship, that gets noticed by a British navy ship and the British would be legally in the right to intervene.
Also, all of the sometimes strange "law of the sea" stuff aside many countries, including the US, take the view that if your crime harms their citizens or property, you can be punished by their courts for it, even if you aren't a citizen or resident of their country. You see cases like that for things like financial fraud on the Internet, where sometimes a person is extradited and tried in another nation because the people they defrauded were in that nation, not the nation of their residence.
Piracy is a universal crime and has universal jurisdiction, any nation has the authority to intervene and imprison the pirates, no matter what nation they are from or who they attacked.
And that’s where these idiots made their mistake, they hijacked a US flagged vessel.
Almost no commercial vessel in international waters is US flagged, but because the Maersk Alabama was carrying food aid under a US government contract it was required to be a US flagged vessel. To be US flagged it must have (among other things) an American captain and crew.
International maritime law is quite clear that navies can legally defend their commercial fleets anywhere on the planet.
The Maersk Alabama was an anomaly among all the vessels they typically went after (which mostly flew flags of convenience like Panama and Liberia). Unfortunately for the pirates, they took a vessel that shared the flag of the most powerful and capable Navy on the planet that was looking to make an example on what happens to pirates.
Look at it from the reverse perspective: if it was international waters, who's going to say you can't kidnap someone and imprison them in any country you want?
That's obvious not the case here and there are all sorts of maritime and international laws, but if it was truly lawless, that would mean that an international actor could act with impunity as well.
We still do, unless you're in a big blue city where every criminal is a victim and just needs a 48th chance to show he'll stop graping, stealing and assaulting people.
Have to ask for help to get Toothpaste from behind glass, because that's what 'compassion' leads is. 🤡
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u/Ewggggg 1d ago
How can he be charged in a country he never visited? Just because the ship is owned by an Danish company registered under an American flag?