Migrant smuggling by sea: tackling practical problems by applying a high-level inter-agency approach

Huge disparities in wealth across the world, the denial of fundamental rights in some countries and natural disasters have resulted in broad population movements, also by sea. The most famous examples are without a doubt the flow of Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s and the 2001 incident with the MV Tampa – a ship carrying over 400 migrants – that caused a dispute between Indonesia and Australia. But also more recently, as a result of the Arab Spring, maritime migration came into the picture as hundreds of people died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe in 2011. However, as a sea journey is often difficult and dangerous, migrants request the help of smugglers to reach their destination. The first part of this paper will deal with the question why migrant smuggling is regarded as a maritime safety and a maritime security problem. To deal with this problem, States took several initiatives on both the international and the regional level to combat smuggling. These initiatives will be dealt with in the second and in the third part of this paper. In a fourth part we will take a look at some of the problems that may arise in applying these initiatives in practice. Finally, in the last part, some suggestions will be made to improve the legal framework by proposing a high-level inter-agency approach