Kristof Gombeer speaks on the Protection of People at Sea at 81st Biennial International Law Conference, Athens
On 28 June 2024, Dr Kristof Gombeer spoke on State jurisdiction and the protection of people at sea at the 81st Biennial Conference of the International Law Association (ILA) in Athens, Greece.
Over 30 million people find themselves at sea on a daily basis. This can be in their capacity as a fisherman or a worker on an oil rig, but for example also as a tourist on a cruise ship or as a refugee crossing the sea on an unseaworthy boat. All these people have different protection needs. An important legal question therefore concerns the identification of the States responsible for providing such protection.
The recently established ILA Committee on the Protection of People at Sea aims to address precisely this question in the first four years of its mandate: Under which conditions can States legally protect people at sea (if they want to), and under which conditions are States obliged to do so (even if they don’t want to)? The Committee will play a leading role in the development of international law in this domain, producing a state of the art in this field as well as issuing recommendations to States and other key actors, such as the European Union, on the scope of their obligations.
At the 81st Biennial ILA conference held in Athens between 25-28 June 2024, the Committee held its first open session for a broader audience. After Professor Anna Petrig (Basel University, Switzerland) introduced the working agenda of the Committee for the next four years, Professor Irini Papanicolopulu (SOAS, United Kingdom) provided context to the protection of people at sea as an emerging theme in international law. Professor Natalie Klein (UNSW, Australia) subsequently shed a critical light on the Geneva Declaration on Human Rights at Sea. Finally, Dr Kristof Gombeer presented on the function, meaning, and scope of the different notions of jurisdiction in the international law of the sea and international human rights law. He also discussed the challenges ahead for the Committee and its mandate in understanding the relation between these two notions of jurisdiction.
The Committee consists of experts of different legal systems from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. For the Netherlands, Dr Gombeer was nominated as a Committee Member by the Royal Netherlands Society of International Law (KNVIR).