scholarly journals Prosecuting Piracy at the High Seas: the Experience of Malaysia

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 307
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hameedullah Md Asri ◽  
Md Khalil Ruslan

The development of the law on piracy under two major international treaties; the Geneva Convention, 1958 and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982 has witnessed great acceptance and application of the law with many coastal states have crafted specific anti-piracy law as a manifestation of their commitments to the international treaties. However, up until today, Malaysia has yet to come out with a single and unified statute against piracy despite being a member to both treaties. The law is scattered in a different set of documents and carried out by various agencies that are responsible to each respective law. It is argued that given this is the position in Malaysia, the prosecution of piracy would be a critical problem for the law enforcement. In this paper, we address this concern by looking at both Malaysian legal framework as well as the experience of the country against international piracy, particularly the case of Bunga Laurel. The findings suggest that there are more than twenty Acts that might be used against piracy. As a sovereign state under the international law, Malaysia also has the right to resort to principles of international law for the apprehension and prosecution of high sea pirates. To this effect, the case of Bunga Laurel has really manifested the successful application of Malaysian law by the High Court of Malaya against international piracy. The paper concludes that the absence of a single anti-piracy law is not necessarily an obstacle, but instead an advantage with great choice of law available for the prosecution in this country.

Author(s):  
Hong Suhn-Kyoung ◽  
Cheong Seong-Koo

This chapter discusses the law of set-off in South Korea, along with certain restrictions on the exercise of the right of set-off in insolvency proceedings. The legal framework for set-off in South Korea is based on the Civil Code. The courts have also generally supported set-off as a means of satisfying a claim or discharging debt. The Korean Private International Law does not expressly lay down the governing law for set-off. This governing law issue is commonly discussed under two scenarios: set-off is undertaken on the basis of a set-off agreement between the parties; and set-off is undertaken in the absence of an agreement. The chapter first considers the governing law of contractual and non-contractual set-off in South Korea before turning to set-off between solvent parties and set-off against insolvent parties. It also analyses issues arising in cross-border set-off.


Author(s):  
Harrison James

Chapter 7 reviews the legal framework for the regulation of fishing in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and explains how States have developed additional rules and standards for the conservation of marine living resources at global and regional levels. In particular, the analysis considers the extent to which States have implemented a precautionary and ecosystems approach to fisheries, as well as how they have sought to adopt law-making techniques that overcome the challenges of regulating the open-access resources of the high seas. The chapter covers major developments in the international law of fisheries, including the Code of Conduct on Responsible Fisheries, the Fish Stocks Agreement, the Port State Measures Agreement, and the International Guidelines on Deep-Sea Fisheries. The role of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) in implementing these instruments is considered a key feature of the law-making process. The chapter also addresses the specific regimes that apply to anadromous species, catadromous species, and marine mammals.


Author(s):  
Iryna Dikovska

Part of the legal aid treaties between Ukraine and other states contains rules concerning conflict of laws. Where those that determine the law applicable to contractual obligations, family, and hereditary relations are not in line with current approaches to determining the law applicable to the specified groups of relations. The purpose of the paper is to uncover the differences between the regulation of conflict of laws in private relations in the legal aid treaties between Ukraine and some EU countries and the modern approaches to the regulation of conflict of laws in such relations, contained in other sources of private international law; an explanation of how to solve conflicts between legal aid treaties and other international treaties; outlining the main areas of improvement of rules concerning conflict of laws in legal aid treaties. The methods of the study were comparative, dialectical, and Aristotelian, which allowed to identify the problems of regulation of conflict of law in legal aid treaties and to draw conclusions for their elimination. Application of these methods allowed to find out that lex loci contractus is most often used to regulate contractual obligations in the absence of an agreement of the parties on the choice of applicable law. The agreement between Ukraine and Romania does not provide for the choice of the law for contractual obligations. Legal aid treaties imperatively determine the law applicable to the property relations of the spouses. They apply a dualistic approach to determining the right to inherit. It has been established that competition between the rules of this Convention and the rules of legal aid treaties between Ukraine and Poland and Ukraine and Estonia should be decided in favour of the Hague Convention. It is proposed to amend the legal aid treaties concluded between Ukraine and the EU Member States: the rules concerning conflict of laws, which define the law applicable to contractual, family, and hereditary relations should be revised using the relevant EU regulations as a model.


Author(s):  
Chantelle Feldhaus

Section 28(2) of the Constitution states that a child's best interest is of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child.  Section 9 further provides that every person is considered equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law. Several grounds are listed relating to the unfair discrimination of persons, including their sexual orientation. The concept of care is incorporated in the Children's Act, and it entails a comprehensive description of parents' daily life regarding children and the powers and duties expected to ensure the general protection, well-being and best interests of the child. The aim of this contribution is to discuss the sexual orientation of a parent as a factor when considering care and the extent to which courts may give consideration to such a factor. The article will also address the question of whether or not the role of a parent's sexual orientation in determining the best interests of the child has changed since the common law concept of custody was replaced by the concept of care in the Children's Act. In this article, care and the best interests of the child will be discussed first. International law will be considered thereafter, followed by a discussion on the approach of our courts, pre- and post-1994, in order to come to a conclusion and make recommendations.


Author(s):  
John-Pierre Levy

When the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (the Convention) was adopted in 1982 after nine years of negotiations, it was hailed as "the ultimate constitution for the oceans". For the first time, an international legal instrument acknowledges that "the problems of ocean space are closely interrelated and need to be considered as a whole". Accordingly, in 320 articles and 9 annexes, the treaty provides the international legal framework for exercising the rights and duties of States relating to their uses of ocean space and its resources. After substantially amending the part dealing with the deep seabed area and its resources by the Agreement of 28 July 1994, the Convention entered into force on 16 November 1994 for those States which deposited instruments of ratification. It is now strongly supported by a significant majority of the States of the world, including major maritime powers, developing states, and others. The Convention codifies and develops customary international law as well as creating new rules and institutions. In some respects, the Convention provides specific rules and, in other respects, more general rules, whose precise meaning will evolve through practice. The Convention provides at minimum a framework for all uses of the sea. It envisages other international agreements, bilateral and multilateral, to elaborate its implementation. In spite of the breadth of the subject matter, the practice of States generally conforms to the law of the sea embodied in the Convention. The international community rightly feels proud of its achievement. But international law (and the law of the sea in particular) is a reflection of the needs of States during a certain period in history and their expectations of the future. This Convention does not necessarily contain the answers to all the challenges awaiting humankind in the 21st century, but it provides a sound framework for addressing them. Before examining in depth the issues relating to the delimitation of the outer limit of the continental shelf, a brief review of the major features of the Convention is appropriate. In the aftermath of World War II and soon after the creation of the United Nations in 1945, the new world organization requested its International Law Commission to consider the codification of existing customary international law relating to the oceans.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32
Author(s):  
Thomas Keenan

Abstract Despite the ubiquitous coverage of the Libyan revolution throughout the last six months, very little has been said regarding the legal foundations for the rebels’ actions. Within the international legal framework, it must be asked whether the Libyan people even had a legal right in the first place to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. In fact, the existence of a right to rebel under international law is very much an unsettled matter. Among the sources of international law, a right to rebel is not enumerated in any of the principal international instruments. In truth, the only significant mention of the right is a passing but ambiguous reference in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A customary right of revolution is similarly absent, as many nations criminalize treason and other insurrectionary activities. Instead, if such a right exists in international law, it must derive from the well-enshrined right of self-determination. Th is right would thus constitute an additional exception to international law’s general prohibition on the use force, standing alongside self-defense and Security Council peace enforcement. Yet establishing a right of revolution would mark a significant departure from these other exemptions. In essence, the right of revolution represents an allowance for non-state actors to resort to force unilaterally for the protection of human rights. For this very reason, contemporary international law likely does not recognize a popular right to revolt. In light of international law’s fi rm restrictions on lawful uses of force, there is no evidence that the law currently acknowledges a novel exception for the individual enforcement of human rights. Th us, in the absence of a change in the law, the proper legal remedy for the Libyan people was not rebellion but rather an appeal to the international community.


Author(s):  
Bernardo Calabrese

Abstract: This article focuses on a specific issue involving the so called right to patent in the context of the recently approved Unitary Patent system. Considering the field of private international law related to intellectual property, the issue of the law applicable to initial ownership becomes even more thorny in the legal framework of the Unitary Patent: as a matter of fact, this normative system could convey uncertainty in its application to transnational inventions, by reason of the peculiar criterion of the law of the “(first) applicant” governing the Unitary Patent as an object of property under art. 7, Regulation EU n. 1257/2012. Therefore, an interpretative clarification on this point seems necessary.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 42-57
Author(s):  
Midori Matthew

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (UNCRC), put forth in 1989, has generated a global movement in the direction of protecting and promoting children’s rights, resulting in a paradigm change in how children are perceived under the law. While the UNCRC is the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in human history, children’s fundamental right to protection continues to be violated through actions instigated by adults, such as neglect, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or being coerced into marriage, wartime activities, or slavery. This is largely a result of international law having no empirical legal binding; since countries are sovereign upon themselves, without domestic enforcement by each individual signatory country, there is no obligation to abide by the terms of international treaties. Applying both a philosophical and legal framework, this paper seeks to provide a critical analysis of whether or not treaties of international law, such as the Convention on the Rights of Children (UNCRC), have an unyielded potential to spark a tangible, beneficial change in the promotion of children’s rights, or if such doctrines are nothing more than glorified pieces of lip service paid to bolster the signatory country’s face value on a global level.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-269
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Koulouris

Abstract The notion of Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is a relatively new one. Its gestation during the second half of the 20th century was slow and arduous. But, after its birth, it gained a very important and crucial place within the sector of International Law and especially the branch of the Law of the Sea. Furthermore, it implicates strong and unprecedented geopolitical issues, emerged between a lot of neighbouring states. Pursuant to the rule establishing its notion, the EEZ confers upon a State a sovereign right, subject to a number of restrictions, which do not, nevertheless, affect the core of its integrity. But, in real international life this integrity is seriously jeopardized. International Law, because of its particularity, cannot be equipped by and enjoy the means of forced execution, which are inherent to the national legal system of every sovereign State. The EEZ, as it is provided by the International Law and especially the United Nations Convention on the Law Of the Sea, is not in reality a sovereign right of a State. It depends on the consensus of the State with adjacent coast and overlapping EEZ, which is a ‘prerequisite’ legally not existing.


Author(s):  
Carla Ferstman

This chapter considers the consequences of breaches of human rights and international humanitarian law for the responsible international organizations. It concentrates on the obligations owed to injured individuals. The obligation to make reparation arises automatically from a finding of responsibility and is an obligation of result. I analyse who has this obligation, to whom it is owed, and what it entails. I also consider the right of individuals to procedures by which they may vindicate their right to a remedy and the right of access to a court that may be implied from certain human rights treaties. In tandem, I consider the relationship between those obligations and individuals’ rights under international law. An overarching issue is how the law of responsibility intersects with the specialized regimes of human rights and international humanitarian law and particularly, their application to individuals.


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