Resolving the Issue of Sea-stranded Rohingyas

A fishing boat carrying around ninety Rohingya left Cox’s Bazar for Malaysia around 11 February 2021. Its engine failed four days out. A distress call went up on the night of 20 February, and the Indian Coast Guard reached it around 25 February, by which point the passengers had run out of food and water, several were severely dehydrated, and at least eight people had died.

The interval between the breakdown and the rescue is where this piece locates a gap in the law.

Obligations to render assistance at sea are relatively clear and fall on whoever is in a position to help. What follows rescue is not clear at all. No state is obliged to permit disembarkation, and where the rescued are stateless and unwanted the predictable result is a period in which every state’s position is that responsibility belongs to another.

Treating each episode as an emergency to be settled by negotiation guarantees the next one. The defect sits in the framework rather than in the conduct of any particular coastguard, and it brings my law of the sea work and my Rohingya work onto the same set of facts.