If a cruise ship is a floating metropolis, then the captain is its mayor.
But with regards to law and order, there is no police force and no courts. That can leave sufferers of crime aboard the ship unprotected, as it isn’t always clear which legal guidelines practice.
A sexual assault case aboard a Mediterranean cruise ship last week highlighted that felony ambiguity when a Spanish decide released the detained suspect after the ship docked in Valencia. The judge declared that Spain had no jurisdiction in the case because the alleged crime was stated to have taken place in international waters, consistent with a report in the Spanish newspaper Levante.
If Spain cannot prosecute, then which one? S. Can?
“There’s no cut-and-dried rule,” stated Frederick Kenney, the director of criminal affairs and external relations for the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations corporation accountable for worldwide shipping safety.
“There is no global regulation that covers this case in the meantime,” he said.
Maritime law establishes that a ship is subject to the country’s laws whose flag it flies. But for tax reasons and different criminal benefits, few cruise ships are flagged with the countries in their domestic port or even their company headquarters.
In the Spanish case, the suspect was detained aboard the MSC Divina, which flies a Panamanian flag and is in concept challenge to Panama’s legal guidelines. We won’t have the sources to research crimes that take place some distance from its shores in practice.
But other laws in the location have to have covered the victim, said Aleksandra Ivankovic, the deputy director of Victim Support Europe, a victims’ rights organization.
“Even assuming that the Spanish decision made a lawful selection according to Spanish law, from the perspective of human rights, her rights as a victim of a horrible crime were not reputable,” Ms. Ivankovic stated.
The Istanbul Convention on violence towards women, a European treaty, must apply to the case, she said.
The suggested sexual attack aboard the MSC Divina involved a 17-year-old victim from the UK, consistent with Levante; the 18-12 months-antique suspect was Italian. The sufferer stated the assault early on April 11 whilst the delivery was cruising between Palma de Mallorca and Valencia.
Evidence of CIL includes “constitutional, legislative, and executive promulgations of states, proclamations, judicial decisions, arbitral awards, writings of specialists on international law, international agreements, and resolutions and recommendations of international conferences and organizations.” (5). It follows that such evidence is sufficient to make “internationally recognized human rights” protected under universally recognized international law. Thus, CIL can be created by the general proliferation of the legal acknowledgment (opinion Juris) and actions of States of what exactly constitutes “internationally recognized human rights.”
2. The next level of binding international law is that of international agreements (treaties), or Conventional International Law. Just as jus cogens rights and rules of law, as well as CIL, are primary and universally binding legal precepts, so do international treaties form binding international law for the Party Members that have ratified that treaty. The same way that some States’ domestic constitutional law declares the basic human rights of each State’s citizens, so do international treaties create binding law regarding the rights delineated therein, according to the customary international jus gentium principle of pacta sunt servanda (agreements are to be respected). Treaties are, in turn, internalized by the domestic legal system as a matter of law. Thus, for example, the U.N. Charter’s provision against the use of force is binding international law on all States, and it, in turn, is binding law in the United States, for example, and on its citizens. (6) Treaties are analogous to “contracts” in the domestic legal system.
