Experts Release Report Explaining that International Law Can Help Suppress Piracy

The Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), in partnership with ASIL and the One Earth Future Foundation, have released a report entitled: “Suppressing Maritime Piracy: Exploring the Options in International Law”.  It is a useful report, and it is the product of a very smart and knowledgeable group of international law experts including friends of this blog like John Bellinger, Eugene Kontorovich, David Glazier, and Beth Van Schaack.  But like many of these committee panel reports, it doesn’t really come to any conclusion or consensus on the legal problem of how to encourage nations to punish piracy (at least not as far as I can tell).  But it is at least a start in the conversation.  My own view is that nations just won’t have the right incentives here and that ultimately, this is going to be dealt with by better self-help mechanisms on merchant ships. But I defer to the judgments of these experts, whose ideas a worth reading.