ABSTRACT
Environmentalists attending the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2002, to seek a global agreement to salvage the world’s depleted fisheries were informed that poor management of the world’s oceans is destroying ecosystems and threatening the sustainability of the fisheries. Within a couple of months, an appeal was made by the Director of the International Maritime Bureau (1MB) for the intensification of patrols by naval and police of coastal and island states following the incident in the Gulf of Aden, off the Yemeni coast, when a blast ripped through a French-flagged tanker, the m.v. Limburg. The ship was allegedly rammed by a small boat. A few days later, on 19 October 2002, at around 0914 (local time), a six-metre long wooden motorboat approached a large container ship in the Hugh River, West Bengal, India. A person, allegedly armed with a long knife, boarded the ship at its stern using a long hook attached to a rope. The alert crew of the ship sounded an alarm and the would-be robber (pirate) jumped overboard and escaped. The ICC Annual Piracy Reports, have recorded significant increases in the number of piracy attacks on the world’s oceans, notably 335 attacks in 2001: 370 in 2002; and, in the first half of 2003 there were at least 150 incidents, of which 64 attacks were reported within Indonesian archipelagic waters.
