The €1 Billion Game of Tag: Europe's Costly Hunt for the Sea Raiders

They live by the sea, but outside the law. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of pirates? Perhaps Captain Jack Sparrow, multi-masted ships, treasure chests, or the Jolly Roger flag. The enduring legacy of piracy doesn’t revolve around treasure; it revolves around the archaic legal systems molded to destroy pirates’ enterprise. While modern usage defines piracy as “the act of attacking ships to steal from them,” this oversimplified definition fails to reflect the term’s evolution. The critical shift, since the 14th century, lies in the lack of state sanction. By overlooking this crucial element, the current definition depoliticizes the crime, treating it merely as a violent act and failing to recognize its genuine implications for national sovereignty. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton posited that piracy was ‘‘a seventeenth-century crime’’ requiring ‘‘twenty-first century solutions.” This further highlights the persistent tension in how outdated legal assumptions continue to shape modern anti-piracy approaches.

Over the centuries, states have attempted to reduce piratical activity, ranging from enforcing universal jurisdiction to eliminating safe-haven ports. Nevertheless, this is as far as states have come toward curbing the problem. Despite overwhelming naval superiority over pirates, countries face a crucial strategic loophole: a political disinclination to fully commit resources to decouple complex financial and criminal governance structures onshore that enable pirates to find refuge and generate income. Are nations too lenient on pirates, or are nations too weak in this area, to the extent that damage to economic goods and human rights is inevitable?

Pirates were a perennial hazard since the Middle Ages, tiding around the North Sea, patrolling the busiest sea lanes, boarding ships to overpower the crew, or ambushing ships at ports to plunder goods before local authorities could arrive. However, the modern perspective departs from ancient practices, where the popular image of pirates butchering their victims was rare in medieval times. Crimes on the water were contested among kings, as if “a legal no-man’s land”, where uniform laws weren’t set or agreed upon because there was no need to. France’s “Rôles d’Oléron” is the oldest sea law regulating medieval maritime financial activity. Given that financial redress was more common than criminal punishments, the fact that pirates were considered merchants, not aligned with any particular nationality, further complicated their convictions. Chasing down criminals for punishment was still a contested issue and risked international conflict; therefore, paying financial damages was a far more sensible alternative than actions that might provoke a war. Francis Le Clerk was a successful pirate, brutally captured by the state prosecution. Yet his case was dismissed because Le Clerk “bribed the sheriff to simply make the case ‘go away’”. If the state was unable to uphold its own law, how did civilians pursue justice for their damages? Reprisals allowed civilians to recover losses caused by pirates personally. Not only were the lax legal proceedings affecting enforcement, but wealth and reprisal provided enough social capital to “get away with murder”. This era is what historians call “the Golden Age of Piracy”, where pirates developed techniques, durable ships, ambush tactics, and actively started repressing the state.

Since the Middle Ages, piracy tactics have developed, yet laws have remained unaltered. In 1932, a group of Harvard researchers drafted a convention to define piracy under domestic and international law. They concluded that the “law of nations” differed from state jurisdiction, in which piracy was considered illegal only at the national level because it affected only private actors. This would mean that until the 21st century, there wasn’t a central international authority of jurisdiction. Today, however, the image of a small ship has been replaced by organized criminal enterprises that launch calculated attacks hundreds of miles offshore, primarily targeting cargo ships for ransom payments and disrupting the world's shores.

The current status is that anti-piracy attempts have been successful, yet there is room for improvement. Critics have argued that because of the narrow nature of the definition, it fails to recognise many cases of maritime violence as outside the law. This was the case with Somalia. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982 and ratified in 1989, is an internationally-bound treaty that sets the legal framework for maritime activity, regulating contiguous zones (where a state can enforce law but does not control resources), territorial seas, and exclusive economic zones (where a state has special rights to use natural resources). It inserts three components into the definition of piracy: acts of violence/detention, acts committed for personal gain, and actions taken on high seas, which are characteristically outside national jurisdiction. This treaty relegated the power of handling maritime activity from the international community to national jurisdiction. Article 105 of UNCLOS specifies that every state has the right to seize ships and arrest those on board. Somalia became the exception to this rule.

Most recently, Somalia has fallen victim to the vagueness of UNCLOS. Somalia shares a border with Kenya, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in April 2009 to resolve maritime control-related disputes. This would allow both nations to submit proposals on which area of the Indian Ocean they would control, granting each nation the ability to extract resources from those waters, even if such lands are disputed. If both nations agree to the other's proposed division of waters in accordance with international law, such as the United Nation’s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), both sovereign nations will be able to pursue economic activities. In August, Somalia's Transitional Federal Parliament (TFP) rejected Kenya’s proposal, arguing that Kenya’s submission included a large area of Somalia’s maritime space; agreeing to the proposal would force Somalia to abandon its sovereignty and willingly cede the disputed border line to Kenya. Led by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2014, Somalia took Kenya to court to claim contested land, ultimately granting Somalia a significant portion of the contested land. Given Somalia’s weak institutional capacity and Kenya’s numerous attempts at taking advantage of Somalia’s territories, the international community has failed to act in Somalia’s best interest by helping to tackle piracy. Due to the constraints of national sovereignty, as highlighted by Article 105, any nation outside Somalia cannot take action on Somali waters unless the government allows access to such operations, which limits the scope of action. In 2017, Somalia expressed that the international community should assist the Somalian government in enhancing its institutional capacity to fight piracy in a multilateral manner. In response, the United States and European Union (EU) governments have stepped up their efforts to tackle piracy by strengthening cooperation to reduce global piracy and counterfeiting and fostering more public-private partnerships to protect intellectual property.

A similar case was faced in Nigeria, where pirates attacked a ship, intending to steal oil rather than cause any harm to the crew. According to the official definition of piracy set by the UNCLOS treaty, this act diverges from the traditional definition and becomes rather an unrecognised act of crime. This was the first case that brought international attention to pirates who impeded economic activity. The case of Nigeria reveals significant loopholes in international law that permitted the replication of similar crimes abroad, such as acts of piracy in Southeast Asia in 2014.

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) reports “an increase in reported incidents of maritime piracy and armed robbery in 2025, with the highest recorded number since 1991, where pirates are actively targeting new regions–today, it’s Southeast Asia. One of the central organizations that regulates maritime activity is the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which operates under the auspices of the UN. Over the years, the IMO has worked on drafting more rigid international law, especially in the field of piracy. However, nations are reluctant to adopt legislation that would restrict their national sovereignty. The EU has played an active role in Somalia’s case by launching the EU naval force called “Operation Atalanta.” Operation Atalanta’s budget has risen from €8.3 million in 2008 to €13.8 million in 2025, reflecting growing strategic interest in sea activity. In 2016, it was mentioned that the EU would work closely with the United Nations (UN) to enforce and further the UNCLOS treaty. Since the launch of the EU’s maritime security, it has become the fastest-growing area of EU security cooperation. The EU considers this a high-priority issue because it furthers its own interest, as 90% of its trade is by sea. In the case of Somalia, the EU intervention operation was done on “humanitarian and geostrategic factors”, in addition to the economic interests that are less often talked about. More recently, in 2023, the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have agreed to cooperate, calling it “maritime multilateralism”, as highlighted in both organizations’ strategy outlines. The EU has a commercial vested interest in repressing piracy because it also affects its member states’ national security and economic activity. Particularly, the EU has been a strong proponent of Article 100 that obliges all states to cooperate, to the fullest extent of the law,  on curbing piracy on high seas and seas outside national jurisdiction. 

In our current legal climate, the EU appears to be the only actor that has the strategic, economic, and political leverage to oblige nations to act multilaterally in dealing with piracy. The reason for that is that many nations will refuse to abandon even some part of their sovereignty to deal with piracy in the long term. The UN has voiced concerns about the universal adoption of maritime laws due to national laws being non-compliant with international law, which is where the majority of disagreement originates. With this understanding, changes in domestic law would be the first step of this process, such as establishing the definition of piracy within national borders, because dealing within legal systems streamlines the policy-making process. It is expected to see the emergence of non-state actors taking an active role in contributing to local maritime legislation. Adopting a universal definition of piracy would be a significant first step towards achieving a universal approach to tackling violent piracy. When the EU, US, and other great powers combine their legislative might to tackle a universal problem, we can transform soft law into rigorous, universal regulation that directly combats piracy.