Abu Dhabi – The Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on Legal issues related to piracy off the coast of Somalia, Jack Lang has welcomed UAE’s initiative to host a conference on piracy in the Indian Ocean on 18 and 19 April 2011.

It will be the first ever conference to be attended by both the 60 nations and international organizations striving to combat piracy and some one hundred businesses, shipping companies, charterers and insurers affected or concerned by this scourge.

“I will have the honour of speaking at this event at the invitation of UAE Foreign Affairs Minister Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to present the report on piracy off the coast of Somalia that I submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and which has just given rise to a UN Security Council resolution.” said Jack Lang.

He insisted that the international community needs to respond firmly to a phenomenon of extreme gravity for the region and the world’s economies as a whole. Since the start of this surge in piracy off the coast of Somalia, 700 attacks have been reported and over 2,000 seafarers have been taken hostage, 790 of them in 2010 alone. The crew members, deprived of their freedom, are now systematically tortured. There is no end to the pirates’ audacity. They have flouted their own code of honour.

“Piracy has destabilising effects on the entire Indian Ocean region. The United Arab Emirates, like all Gulf countries, is no longer spared this scourge. The security of trade flows to and from the Gulf countries is under threat. In this regard, I congratulate and salute the UAE armed forces for their successful operation in coordination with the US Fifth Fleet this month to free the vessel MV Arillah-I, which had fallen into the hands of pirates in the Gulf of Oman. It appears vital for one of the region’s major countries, the United Arab Emirates, to play a role in the international and regional mechanism. An alliance of all States is now urgent to be able to launch a comprehensive response to preserve the basic principle of the freedom of the seas”, he added.

Lang noted that in Somalia, the pirate mafia is eating away at, if not supplanting the traditional economy: drug trafficking and human trafficking, logistics support to the pirates, lack of job-creating investment, and breakdown of Somali society. We are approaching the point of no return. The pirates have in effect become the masters of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, and their incursion into the Red Sea is only being held back by the determination of the nations engaged in naval operations there.

He pointed out that the main victims of piracy are the Somali people themselves, already devastated by 20 years of conflict. The lives of 2.4 million people are now dependent on nothing more than the food aid provided them by the World Food Programme. One in four children in Southern Somalia suffers from malnutrition. Yet these facts do not dissuade the pirates from acting against their compatriots’ interests by attacking the vessels carrying international aid. These ships can only reach the destitute populations under naval escort: 30 percent of European Operation Atalanta’s capacities are taken up doing this and escorting logistics support vessels for AMISOM, the only pan-African peacekeeping operation.

“We cannot commend highly enough the action taken by the naval forces since 2007. Nevertheless, their deterrent effect is massively undermined by the feeling that the pirates operate with impunity: 90 percent of them are released for want of a clearly established judicial solution. All countries that agree to combat this impunity by judging the pirates are to be encouraged. The United Arab Emirates is to be congratulated for its decision to hand the captured pirates from the freed MV Arillah-I over to their authorities to be brought to justice”, he added.

Regarding the proposed plan for Somalia, which the United Nations Security Council has decided to take up, Lang said that two considerations guided his action: the extremely urgent need to act and the need to “Somaliaze” the response. No solution coming from the outside could overcome the symptom of instability and the absence of a rule of law. In its adoption of Resolution 1976 on 11 April 2011, the UN Security Council has come down in favour of a clear solution: the Somali solution. It has consequently drawn up a road map for the set of actions that will give Somalia’s youth the choice to refuse piracy.

This involves engaging in a number of areas: delimiting the maritime spaces; developing the economy; building land-based coastal monitoring capabilities and forensic capacities; prosecuting the masterminds at the head of the networks, etc. In addition to these medium-term actions, the Somali people need our support to put an end to the pirates’ impunity. The Somali people could judge captured pirates themselves by setting up dedicated courts within Somalia (in the provinces of Puntland and Somaliland) as well as a Somali court temporarily operating out of another country in the region, but transferred to Mogadishu as soon as the situation allows. The pirates would then have to answer for their actions before Somali judges, who would enforce Somali law.

Lang deeply valued all the initiatives that will strengthen Somali governance and rule of law, with due regard for human rights. However, he said that they cannot accept a division of tasks that would negate Somalia’s sovereignty, denying it the right to judge its own nationals and giving it merely the prospect of imprisoning them.

“A figure is called for to give an idea of the financial effort required: the legislative reform, the construction of two prisons in Somaliland and Puntland, the establishment of two specialized courts in these regions and the court outside the country (on the premises of the International Criminal Court for Rwanda in Arusha), and running the entire system for three years have been estimated, with UNODC assistance, at $25 million. What is such a sum compared with the prohibitive cost of piracy of at least 7 billion per year considering the naval operations, ransoms, price increases, insurance and so on.” he added.

“The Government of the United Arab Emirates is calling us to the first high-level conference to raise funds to combat piracy. We cannot miss this opportunity, while we still have the possibility to act. In “willing and acting”, the most important thing is “willing”, he concluded.

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