The problem is twofold: a lack of legal authority and a lack of will to enforce what authority does exist. The
UN Security Council has passed a series of Chapter 7 resolutions -- five last years alone -- that authorize military
forces to pursue pirates into Somalia's territorial waters and ashore, if necessary. In theory, this gives the United
States the right to carry out air strikes and amphibious raids on pirate lairs and to sink pirate ships. But as of
this writing, such strikes have not happened -- after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in a clash with Somali
militiamen in 1993, U.S. policymakers are reluctant to send troops back to the region. The only time President
Barack Obama has authorized the use of lethal force was when Captain Phillips' life was judged to be in danger.
To take only one example, according to The New York Times, in September 2008,
"a Danish warship captured 10 men suspected of being pirates cruising around the Gulf of Aden with rocket-
propelled grenades and a long ladder. But after holding the suspects for nearly a week, the Danes concluded
that they did not have jurisdiction to prosecute, so they dumped the pirates on a beach, minus their guns."
As this incident indicates, naval forces are severely hindered by the lack of an effective mechanism for dealing
with captured pirates. Under legal doctrines dating back to the Roman Empire, any state can try suspected
pirates in its own court system, even if they did not attack its own ships. But as Eugene Kontorovich, a law
professor at North-Western University, notes in an upcoming article in the California
Law Review, legal obstacles to effective prosecution have emerged in recent years from
“international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, a variety of
human rights treaties, international refugee law, the UN Conventi on on the Law of
the Sea, and other sources."
The result is that Western nations no longer want to try pirates themselves. In an
extreme example of this kind of reticence, the British Foreign Office has expressed
concern that captured pirates might demand asylum or complain of having their human rights violated.
Source: “How Piracy Was Defeated in the Past and Can Be Again” By Max Boot