Jasmine Coppens

Towards New Rules on Disembarkation of Persons Rescued at Sea

It is an international legal obligation for States to render assistance to persons in distress at sea. However, a comparable legally binding duty to disembark these rescued persons does not exist in the law of the sea. As a result, these persons—often migrants—can spend weeks on a ship at sea before a State allows them to go ashore. This article analyses the existing legal framework concerning disembarkation and evaluates the recent initiatives taken within the International Maritime Organization. Suggestions for future improvements are made.

The Lampedusa Disaster: How to Prevent Further Loss of Life at Sea?

Lampedusa – an Italian island barely 70 miles from northern Africa and 100 miles from Malta – has become a gateway to Europe for migrants. In some seasons, boats filled with asylum seekers arrive almost daily. However, yearly, hundreds of people die trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This paper will deal with the obligations of States towards seaborne migrants, the question of why so many people die near Lampedusa and the possible solutions in order to prevent further loss of life at sea.

Migrants in the Mediterranean: do's and don'ts in maritime interdiction

Mediterranean European Union member states have to deal with thousands of migrants arriving by sea every year. Frontex (the EU external borders agency) organizes joint surveillance operations at sea to interdict these migrant boats, helping states to cope with the problem. This article discusses the legality of these maritime interdictions done by Frontex according to the international law of the sea as well as the conformity of the operations with the nonrefoulement principle.

The Law of the Sea and Human Rights in the Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights

The question of extraterritorial applicability of the principle of non-refoulement – as implicitly present in Article 3 ECHR – on the high seas was decided by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on 23 February 2012 in Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy. The ECtHR found that the applicants had fallen within the jurisdiction of Italy as in the period between boarding onto the Italian ships on the high seas and being handed over to the Libyan authorities, the applicants had been under the continuous and exclusive de jure and de facto control of the Italian authorities. This chapter will deal with the impact of this judgment on the law of the sea rules concerning search and rescue at sea.

Migrant Smuggling by Sea: Tackling Practical Problems by Applying a High-level Inter-agency Approach

Huge disparities in wealth across the world, the denial of fundamental rights in some countries and natural disasters have resulted in broad population movements, also by sea. The most famous examples are without a doubt the flow of Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s and the 2001 incident with the MV Tampa – a ship carrying over 400 migrants – that caused a dispute between Indonesia and Australia. But also more recently, as a result of the Arab Spring, maritime migration came into the picture as hundreds of people died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe in 2011. However, as a sea journey is often difficult and dangerous, migrants request the help of smugglers to reach their destination. The first part of this paper will deal with the question why migrant smuggling is regarded as a maritime safety and a maritime security problem. To deal with this problem, States took several initiatives on both the international and the regional level to combat smuggling. These initiatives will be dealt with in the second and in the third part of this paper. In a fourth part we will take a look at some of the problems that may arise in applying these initiatives in practice. Finally, in the last part, some suggestions will be made to improve the legal framework by proposing a high-level inter-agency approach.