The piracy threat in the Indian Ocean has become a daily affair, hundreds of naval officers and many ships are being held hostage. Despite the fact that leading shipping associations have launched a campaign “Save Our Seafarers”, the governments and the international community are yet to come up with stronger enforcement legal mechanisms to prevent and eradicate the problem.
While the developed nations are equipped with state-of-art technological machineries and instrumentation, developing nations are lagging far behind in their capacity building. As a result, the economic, trade and human losses to developing nations are increasing more in comparison to developed nations.
Capacity building for the developing nations, despite the magnitude of the scale of the problem and losses to the entire international community, including developed nations, is not acquiring significant momentum. While government-to-government capacity building program are subjected to policy-discussions and resource-crunch, there is a need on part of the commercial end-users and intermediaries to devise ways, means and strategies to build the capacity among partners from the developing nations for achieving larger benefits.
There is a need for an Implementation Protocol, a non-binding, gentleman’s understanding, i.e practical and feasible guidelines, as starting point, which can be practiced among the user nations, individuals and commercial companies
Developing nations need to have better knowledge on the legal, judicial, practical institutions and mechanisms employed by the governments and commercial ventures of the developed nations in combating the challenges of piracy
