As Lloyd’s List has highlighted over recent weeks, the vast majority of piracy suspects captured by navies are being set free due to legal hurdles and a lack of available evidence.
But the creation of a new international body to solve this problem is unlikely to offer the quick fix that president Dmitry Medvedev clearly has in mind.
Even a streamlined proposal will require time, an unprecedented international consensus and a commitment to sink a great deal of money into a project that ultimately may not work.
Governments have pointed to Kenya as a site for dealing with this problem, but even here serious concerns about the country’s ability to process these cases are now emerging.
International money could be more effectively ploughed into supporting Kenya’s judiciary and streamlining the legal processes for getting suspected pirates out of the attack skiffs and into court.
Kenya alone, however, is not the silver bullet to this problem and any solution needs to incorporate regional states and a long term international commitment to development.
While Nippon Foundation chairman Yohei Sasakawa’s call this week for an international ocean peace-keeping force and a user-pays system of funding protection is by no means an easy or short term solution, his wider point — that we need to capitalise on the existing international cooperation — is a valid one that needs to be taken seriously.
The availability of finance, political will and naval hardware to tackle piracy is not sustainable indefinitely. If a solution is to be found, it must be found sooner rather than later.
