Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
bbc.com
bbc.com
When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'.
Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices.
If every piece of this puzzle from end-to-end were to have happened in a 'rich country' there'd be legal issues, PR/media, litigation, and a separate kind of bureaucracy altogether, meaning the 'alternative' for a lot of corporations is just 'wash their hands' of it, pay 1/2 the price, and get all the ugly parts 'off the books'.
We are to the point now where we have ample material surplus - we don't need any more 'plastic stuff from China' - it'd be worthwhile to start integrating a lot of 'off the books' stuff into trade deals. Ironically, it would be good for 'them' as well, because in chaotic, quasi-lawless systems it doesn't make sense for participants to invest in anything further ahead than what is in front of their noses (i.e. don't hate the Lebanese shippers for doing the only thing they can do to remain profitable, i.e. don't hate the player, hate the game) ... forcing some degree of transparency and accountability in these systems might raise prices a little bit, but the benefits would likely be immensely positive in the system overall.
It's nice that the story is made personal, about a real individual (think: that Tom Hanks film about someone stuck in international airport limbo) but that's not really the story here is it.
You're right that this is what we're outsourcing. All of the corporate trade agreements - American manufacturing was shipped overseas, and American labor forced to compete with what is often a modern form of slave labor.
I'm also not sure why everyone takes for granted that America not having as many manufacturing jobs is a bad thing...
It sure doesn't help actual slaves.
You’re being perfectly accurate; indentured servitude is consistent with both historical understandings of slavery and modern legal definitions; it was certainly distinct from the particular form of chattel slavery that was popular for a few hundred years and fell out of fashion in thr 19th century, and it is useful to be able to distinguish them since they overlapped in time and space, but that particular form of slavery was not the historically dominant form, itself, and it doesn’t make sense to narrow the definition to that particular form.
While, certainly, that form of chattel slavery was the most immediate concern for, say, American abolitionists, I think they would see it as badly missing the point and not actually abolishing slavery if indentured servitude had been restored to replace chattel slavery.
However I found a curious tidbit the other day; the 1619 ship had indentured servants not slaves. Not to belittle their plight, as they were de facto slaves as soon as they got on the ship.
This is not from outsourcing, this is Kafkaesque bureaucracy created by Egypt itself.
All of that being said, I agree an American company likely would have had this sorted out faster, because the USA tends to deal with bankruptcies and the like very quickly.
I assume it's not always the most sound way to do business but some should get away with it.
we're headed away from UFP and more towards DOOP.
Well, they occasionally say they don’t (and Roddenberry said they don’t), but they actually do (or discussing the fact that they do) in every single one of the series, and several of the movies.
> and it’s post-scarcity so they don’t run out of resources.
They do run into resource limits.
Also, the UFP is, you known, fiction, and not even haed science fiction (or even particularly internally consistent fiction.)
Let's assume that logistics organisations consistently run out of resources. That this is a probabalistic outcome of operations. The BBC article even gives us a sense of the baseline risk, about 250 cases presently, and 85 new ones reported in 2020 (meaning that typical durations exceed a year in length).
In that case, how do you address the inevitable circumstance without creating a human rights abuse crisis, presuming sufficient consideration and political will exists for this to occur?
Elsewhere in the thread, surity bonds are mentioned. That is, a ship on entering a port or other navigational / marine facility, places a bond in which some large and far more solvent entity assures that compensation where due is paid.
International treaties (to which major transit points such as canals might be obligated to join) are another option.
An international response organisation with the ability to both intervene and impose additional sanctions on any entities which impose such sailor-arrest.
Keep in mind that the 2020 Beruit ANFO explosion occurred after a not-dissimilar situation, in which a ship was deemed unseaworthy and its cargo seized and held under exceptionally (and ultimately massively fatal and damaging) conditions, in part because its ownership and questions over compensation were not met.
(There were quite admittedly other concerns and failures, including by the Beruit port authority and judiciary, but the ownership and payment aspects touched on most of these. Hazardous cargo and storage have been at the heart of several other recent major disasters, including in Tianjin, China.)
Whilst "flag of convenience" regulations make race-to-the-bottom standards in shipping regulation common, obligations to maintain surity bonds or similar instruments of substantial duration (e.g., a year or more) to access major ports, canals, fueling depots, and the like, could help ensure compliance.
This isn’t the result of big massive conglomerates. It’s mom and pop small firms.
People to small and broke to sue.
This legal fiction is only true as long as it is allowed to be. Egypt can see who was operating and using the ship and block their other ships until they fix the issue - they don't need to hold a scapegoat hostage for years.
> TransAm appealed, but in a 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the Board’s reinstatement order (TransAm Trucking v. Department of Labor, 2016). Judge Neil Gorsuch dissented.
So absolute upper bound for losses is $180 million. If I were making odds I would guess that only 1/3 of the ships diverted around Africa, so $30 million, and that the rescue cost another $15 million, so over/under $45 million.
And that's without even bringing up that there was a canal pilot on the ship at the time who may share some portion of the responsibility for the accident. So, yeah, it's extortion.
More likely: Ships are required by rules to have an Egyptian pilot on-board during the passage, and there is limited legal liability for ordinary operating circumstances. That said, if an Egyptian pilot was found grossly negligent of their duties, then they would be liable. However, in most legal systems, this is an exceptionally high bar. And, I assume if you pass the canal, you subject yourself to the Egyptian court system. (Read about the big cruise ship that ran aground in Italy. That story reads like text book gross negligence!)
“(7) Owners, mobilizers, charterers and/or operators bind themselves responsible for any mistakes resulting from pilot’s advice or arrise by SCA personnel.”
https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/Navigation/Pages/Ruleso...
The same applies here: yes, Egypt is corrupt. Yes, this is a massive violation of human rights. But the company took on a moral responsibility when it sent out that crew. We can't excuse someone from their ethical duty simply because other people neglect theirs. Ethics is meaningless if it stops applying as soon as there's corruption outside.
I wonder what would have happened if he refused to sign
Obviously it doesn’t change the tragic situation, had he not signed up as custodian we’d be reading an article about a ship captain stuck on a ship Not to victim blame there is a difference between someone stole x thousands from my home vs I lost x thousands investing in an ostrich farm Both are sad, but ...
The court did not do some random detention (they did let the rest of the crew) but they declared him the responsible party. In that case, he did break the Egyptian law.
If you are getting a job where you bear a certain responsibility, you have to make sure that the company is not breaking the law through you. You'll be responsible, and worse, if the company is headquartered overseas, you might bear the whole responsibility.
In places with stronger regulation and rule of law, these letterbox shell corporations are not allowed or strictly regulated.
"Powerful people demand that there is always some scapegoat who they can abuse, even if they aren't at fault and it doesn't really help make things better."
Blood for the blood god, I suppose!
Somewhere down the line, yeah, Egypt is to blame, but we are the source of the problem - we are to blame. If you want these kind of things to decrease, try to buy local products, try to buy second hand, try to vote for the benefit of everybody (not just you or your group), try to pollute less, try to be conscious about the effects of your actions, and be less egoistic.
Nope. This is a lie fabricated by big corporations so that they don't seem responsible.
People have limited money and time. Just because you buy a more expensive product does not mean it is produced more ethically.
If two companies are selling their product for the same price then the one using non ethical behavior to lower production cost will still make more profit. It has a competitive advantage and will take over the market. Increasing the base price because you as a consumer are willing to pay more does not help the situation.
Some companies advertise with certain labels that imply that they are more ethical. One example of this is called green washing. Most of the time it is an advertisement stunt and does not improve the situation.
The research necessary to ensure the product you buy is ethically produced is way above the scope for an average consumer having a job and other obligations to do.
> We won't vote for politicians that make everybody's life better
Lobbyists have way more power over politicians than the common man trying to vote for the smaller evil.
Only if they are organized do they have a voice. For this they need to first understand that blaming consumers is a lie and that the industry needs to be regulated.
Not that it would help much, because you'd have to phisically escape anyway.
There is a mariner's charity in Greater New York that would help out. They would post a bond with ICE and drive the sailor to an airport or another ship.
Well, whether 9/11 security or what, they weren't allowed to do this. So the captain had been on the ship for over a year.
So, yes, it can happen here.
The locals usually donate food & supplies to the crew.
https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/story/how-a-charleston-p...
That level of cognitive disconnect surely can't be held up as valid in any legal system that has greater cognitive ability to do 'connect the dots drawings'.
And the other is that the port authority wants the ship gone, and not vandalized or becoming a hazard to navigation. So they will require someone to stay on board to maintain it and keep it secure. Which can include getting Immigration to forbid the crew entrance to the country. While they are in port, it's much like being in the secure area of an airport - they're in a gray area and aren't actually in any country. So when that happens, it is illegal for them to leave it.
They're similar, but have some significant and relevant distinctions.
I'm sure there's a number for which I'd agree to be stranded on a boat off the coast of Egypt without power, but I suspect it's closer to 15x my salary.
As I understand it, this makes the latter 100x worse than the former.
Also people don't sign up to be abandoned on a ship, they're not told of that possibility, until it happens. They signed up to be merchant marines or seaman, not prisoners of ghost ships.
Just because you find getting bit by a dog more palatable than falling into a pit of snakes, doesn't make getting bit by a dog okay or acceptable.
OSHA laws require companies allow bathroom breaks though.
It's pretty offensive to compare this to being held prisoner on a ship.
I'm going to blow your mind: RV toilets are just giant bottles with levers and valves.
Your reading of my statement is far from the mark, curiously so.
Maybe you're right, and there will be lawsuits. That's a far cry from saying that the workers there wanted a union.
Last year a building collapsed here during construction and killed about 60 people. Stuff like that happens all the time.
I've also lived in the US for 9 years; I'm also well aware of the mistreatment of workers here, such as workers who are undocumented migrants, workers who are prisoners, workers who work gig companies, Amazon workers, and many others.
Jeff bezos is not pissing in a bottle. The people who profit the most from these ships are never trapped on them.
But now I’m gonna make an exception and point to the Hard Rock building collapse in New Orleans in 2019 which killed 3 workers and injured dozens more[1]. Things like that happen all the time in the US as well.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_du...
I doubt that you could find even one person on here who wouldn't support a blanket ban of outsourcing/externalization tomorrow.
I’ve spent the past few months taking a deep dive into the Dubai real estate market. Excluding some villas, there are maybe 2 or 3 “very nice” buildings.
Many look nice on the outside, but rarely on the inside.
Who has the power to push for better working conditions, transparency and accountability? Let's see:
- A sailor from poor a countries
- A customer from a wealthy country
- A cash stripped shipping company from a poor country
- A successful and massive company from a wealthy country
- A billionaire owning such company
- A politician in the same country
Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019, so Mohammad was not alone for 2 years but only for 7 months (which is no less unacceptable). The only reason Mohammad was allowed to leave was thanks to a local union representative who agreed to take his place as the ship’s guardian.
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.9322048,32.5328029,607m/data...
Or is this just some weird imaging artifact?
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8726136,32.521419,622m/data=...
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8785189,32.5055481,472m/data...
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8477291,32.5178057,452m/data...
I wouldn’t try my luck in a foreign restricted military zone.
The BBC article makes it feel like he was alone for 4 years and somehow was able to stay alive with no food/water for 3 of them before the ship drifted closer to shore where he could now 'buy food and water'.
what is this circle, anyways: https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D...
I don’t even know how to go about enumerating who those people are, their ships, or where they are anchored. With that information a well-organized and/or funded group could at least get someone out to these people to check on them, provide basic supplies, and perhaps some form of reliable communications.
A lot of problems seem insurmountable large and complex, and even this one seems so if your goal is to free these people of their legal liabilities - but if you set aside trying to solve the reason they’re stuck onboard these ships in the first place, providing basic humanitarian aid to them seems doable.
ETA: This looks like a good place to start - https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.home
So maybe people could volunteer to replace them on a rolling schedule.
I just sent an email to the International Maritime Organization, who manages the database I linked in the GP, to ask if there are any extant organizations dedicated to providing relief to people in similar situations. I’ll update here when and if I hear back from them, or as I make progress toward figuring out the scope of this issue in other ways.
(I don't want to get injured by a ship in disrepair)
So what if the guy in question doesn't show up?
In particular, here’s a recent update that sheds some light on why Mr. Aisha remained aboard - in short, he refused to leave unless and until he was paid the wages due to him:
Govt. of Bahrain (7 March 2021)
From Registration of Ships & Seamen Affairs
I would like to highlight few facts as below:
1) Vessel is not abandoned, but under court arrest due to ongoing cases.
2) Seafarer by the name Mohamed Aisha had accepted a court appointment to act as court representative onboard. As such, when the owner repatriated all other crew members he was not allowed to be repatriated by the courts.
3) We had intervened with owner several time and also arranged for the courts to allow his repatriation by appointing another representative, but he decided not to disembark due to outstanding wages.
4) The owners have tried with all resources available to repatriate him but he was not willing to cooperate.
If he is now ready to be repatriated, then the owners are willing to cover such costs of air passage and local charges as a show of our commitment towards him.I'm still not sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.
I can see a parallel world where he decided to get off the boat and we're reading an article about how he lost all that time and won't be able to recover wages, and some HN commenter goes "oh well he should have just stayed on the boat, he got off willingly, so all this discussion is moot".
The reality is this guy was put into a nightmare situation by a combination of his company not appearing to have planned properly (or cared enough about this outcome to prepare for it) and Egypt's ridiculous law where someone can be legally responsible for a ship they have no ownership of. Expecting him to correctly navigate international laws to determine what the action is for him to get off the ship but get paid for the time as he deserves seems somewhat ridiculous. In reality, this situation should never have happened in the first place and I place the vast majority of the blame for that on the company and Egypt.
Both situations have a tremendous unfairness about them but they aren't the same and I don't think it is unreasonable to think that those details are an important part of the story.
The vast majority of the world's population is not in a financial situation where they can just write off months of work for no pay, so they might as well have been legally trapped there.
I suspect there is more to the story, but if the GP entry is to be believed how is wasting away by yourself in a tin can trying to recoup wages from an insolvent company for 2 years a more "optimal strategy" than going home to your family and getting on another boat?
Extricate yourself from the system, do not vindicate yourself from within it.
It definitely sounds like he got at the very least a shitty deal. If you don't have time to watch, he mentions he feels he signed something he didn't fully understand, leaving him liable as guardian, passport seized and all.
If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable.
Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.
It's not about not wanting to offend wealthy people. It's in part a matter of "Who has authority here?"
There's a lot I don't understand about it, but this seems like it's probably a fairly modern development and it's high time we created meaningful solutions so this cannot happen again.
Glad to see he got free and a reporter was talking to him and he was broadcasting via internet. But that should not be how something like this gets resolved, on some kind of ad hoc basis after so long.
And someone here said someone volunteered to take his place, so it's apparently not really resolved, though he got relief.
Your point still remains valid though.
The mess of US civil forfeiture laws originally showed up in maritime law such that the owners and outstanding loans became irrelevant. In effect the physical object is what’s confiscated breaking any ties to anyone that had a prior ownership stake.
If he had title, then he could sell it. The lienholder, however, would have a claim on the proceeds of the sale.
Isn't there a law at sea where if you find an abandoned ship, it is basically yours? Perhaps this law doesn't apply in Egyptian national waters?
If he is the legal guardian of the ship, why wouldn't he be able to just sell it for profit and move on? Was it just that there would be no buyer for it, even to scrap it? Or could there have been fines/liens on that ship such that no one would want to buy it? If that is the case it seems odd that he couldn't himself abandon the ship to the lien holders.
(it would still be slavery, however, you have a right to quit your job).
Salvagers work on contract with the owners in most cases. When they don't there are generally big lawsuits because they are entitled for compensation for their work, but if they don't give anything brought up back the the owners they are in possession of stolen property, and the law around this is complex.
If the vessel is more than 1000 years old we probably can't trace an onwer anymore and you can get by with calling it abandoned in some cases. Though even here the country who's waters it is in might consider the wreck a treasure.
He is the guard, not the owner. As such he can't sell it. The owners are probably in complex bankruptcy court and the lien holders will eventually get to figure out what to do with it, but that will take years to resolve. Indeed the expense of resolving this might be more than the ship is worth so nobody actually wants to resolve it.
I'm no lawyer (so don't try this at home), and I bet you'd need to find a good lawyer to get a with a trick like that :)
But as a creditor in possession of property owned by the debitor, selling said property to recuperate losses doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Certainly, not if debitor does not take action recover possession of the property, etc.
Even if he got into trouble after selling the ship, I would hope a jury would side the person being held for "ransom by said property".
But yes, between Egyptian and Syrian courts, I suppose there is a serious risk you'll get squashed either way. Because we can't have sailors selling their ships :)
It said 250, not thousands.
I bet there would be significant profit in it, at least from the perspective of a handful of individuals, and especially if things could be arranged to make the sailor judgment proof--e.g. have his share of any proceeds go to family members--so free loaders (i.e. lazy ship owners, clients, and insurers) couldn't swoop in at the end to claim any proceeds. But it's not just a matter of profit; it's a matter of opportunity costs. All the parties most capable of pulling this off clearly felt there was more profit to be had by walking away and pursuing other opportunities.
Surely people on HN understand this phenomenon: there are an infinite number of profitable opportunities out there, but some are better than others, and there's only a finite amount of time and capital.
Even if he could manage the ship, a random crew member is highly unlikely to have resources to care for a ship like that... what value is there in assigning him this responsibility? They just punishing someone for the sake of it?
Somebody needs to do it and the crew members are the simplest people to task it to.
The ship had no fuel, it went adrift and ran aground...
Say what?
It would be interesting if this did happen and the court found him guilty of dereliction of duty for not conjuring replacement parts out of thin air. Would he be sent to a land prison or back to the prison of the ship?
100% blame on Egypt here for a stupid rule ignoring consequences.
The article doesn't state it really explicitly but I believe he was able to decline but maybe not aware of when that decision would need to be made - specifically this passage here:
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative [of the shipping company] told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
> Mohammed, they said, should never have signed the order in the first place.
It sounds like he signed a thing without fully understanding the ramifications of it - some eygptian official might have pulled a sneaky to trick him into signing it without full knowledge of the consequences or he may have simply acted unwisely but, either way, I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him (for instance, one of the actual owners could've stepped up and owned their error), or provided clear guidance and legal advice to the crew members.
The fact that the captain GTFO'd before any of this really started to go down really reinforces that this guy was left holding the short end of the stick and the company itself is pretty insanely slimy for not, at least, attempting to continue to support him.
Swimming to shore to get fresh water is a seriously messed up scenario.
Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation. The problem is almost entirely with the Egyptian authorities. Such a situation shouldn't even be possible to develop. The first mate in the article might not have understood the ramifications of what he signed, but the Egyptian court certainly did.
There are all kinds of reasons for why a shipping company would be unable to help. That doesn't mean it should leave a person in a legal limbo. That's on the country rather than the company.
I'm surprised the guy didn't just leave. A country whose laws don't respect you doesn't deserve respect in return.
The CEO was the right person to to replace him immediately until they could make it a sufficiently attractive proposition that someone else would want to do it. You know by the usual means. Pay, supply drops, fuel for power etc.
The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form. It's so bad I would have no issue with the company being blacklisted as a criminal organisation.
And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared? Then what? There could be any number of reasons why a company might be unable to do what they need to do. The guy is still stuck there then, because it all rests on the shipping company rather than the country whose government is holding him there.
So in insolvency that is deemed bankruptcy the assets of the company are traditionally used to deal with as much of the liabilities of the company as they can in rank order of those liabilities. You know secured debt ranks ahead of unsecured etc.
This guy's claim on the assets of the company to get him out of that hell, for me, rank number 1, and alone. Next comes the wages due all employees not deprived of their liberty. And that's the usual way it is done too.
Then if a company has behaved abysmally by choosing to dump their employee in hell then the law needs to be involved on those making that decision. Absolutely. There needs to be consequences for making that /choice/. As was clearly made in this instance assuming the accuracy of the report.
If the company did well instead of go bankrupt who is cashing the biggest check? That is who is responsible. Work your way down that list until you find someone, everyone you can't find is a fugitive and has their assets seized.
This situation was created by the country essentially leaving a 4k tonne vessel derelict off the coast of Eygpt after failing to pay to fuel its ride home so there isn't going to be an easy answer here. It might be that the company had some act-of-god like circumstance happen (like an employee fraudulently embezzling funds and tampering with a fuel gauge to make it look like the ship had far more fuel than it did though... that's insanely unlikely given how shifty everyone is acting).
Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation (which would likely be a large asset loss for the company).
I really don't think Egypt is likely the worst actor in this situation but it was cruel what they put this man through. Ideally the administrator trying to untangle this POS would realize this employee has essentially no power to resolve the situation and release them home - but his options to escape were likely pretty few.
If you're a passing ship the last thing you want to do is piss off Egypt since the country is pretty corrupt and controls the Suez Canal (which you plan on sailing through if your ship is anywhere in the neighborhood) - getting on their bad side is likely a one-way ticket to random inspections and tariffs or an outright ban and the only land close enough for the man to flee to was Egypt itself - so he'd need to sneakily emigrate... he's heading back to Syria so that means he'd need to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border under the radar and potentially without a passport - and probably with very little cash.
I really feel for this dude when he says he was struggling with depression because his situation was utterly screwed - the universe really wasn't on his side.... buuuut, I think the company owning the ship comes out the worst. The article doesn't have the details but something seriously slimy was going on there.
Removing a ship could cause an international incident, but forcing a person to stay alone on a ship without proper living conditions for years wouldn't? Imagine if the guy wasn't Syrian, but was an American instead. This would've either been resolved quickly or there would've been an international incident that would've put the removal of a ship to shame.
There's also a good chance they could've declared the ship lost at sea and either scuttled it or offered it for a dollar (or other token currency amount) to salvage companies.
Either way it sounds like the Captain probably knew what was going on. When the Captain learned that the parent company had ran out of money, he probably was aware of these cases of seafarer abandonment and decided he didn't want to be one of them. So he left the ship, leaving the responsibility on Mohammed.
Mohammed claimed he didn't really know the meaning of this responsibility until everyone else started disembarking. It sounds like by then the captain had been gone, for at least 4 months, and potentially longer.
The Captain sacrificed Mohammed here. Either way, someone was going to be abandoned on that vessel. I think the Captain saw the writing on the wall and abandoned quickly, shifting responsibility onto someone else.
There are lots of people at fault here. Egyptian authorities, Tyson Shipping and Marine Company (which seems to have continued operating despite all this), and the Captain. Unfortunately Mohammed is one of the innocent ones caught in the middle. He shouldn't have signed the paper as the shipping company is quick to point out. But that doesn't resolve the real issue. It would have just meant the Captain or someone else would have been forced into this situation.
That all said - that's a hard battle and one you're probably not going to win unless you a) don't be speak english or b) don't have full control of your mental faculties - "I couldn't be arsed to read the contract" is generally not a defense unless the contract goes out of its way to be intentionally misleading.
This doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves the problem around to the free market. What if no one wanted to buy it for scrap? Would he be responsible for cleaning up the situation himself? The court should have impounded the ship using Egypt's own coast guard and billed the company for the coast guard's time.
Maybe the guy could have made some calls down to Somalia and convinced some pirates that a big prize was ripe for the taking if they were willing to take a road trip?
My friend knew several members of the crew.
> The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi (from a recent-ish HN thread).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/fisherman-lost...
... but, of course, that whole arrangement is predicated on the assumption the owner cares, at all, about the fate of the ship or its crew. Which is, perhaps, a philosophical throwback to a time when ships were the entire livelihood of a town and not assets that multinational corporations own hundreds of.
"It's enough, you might imagine, to make him think twice about going back to sea.
But he is determined. He says he is good at his job and wants nothing more than to pick up where he left off."
EDIT: Apparently his passport may have been confiscated.
It is a sad state of affairs, whichever way you look at it.
There's something odd about this story because neither a passport nor money should have kept him there, unless there was literally some kind of watch for him, and/or the cash situation was really that extremely dire. That said, he was able to survive for 4 years so money had to be coming from somewhere.
I suggest that he was maybe being paid a tiny amount, and that he felt it'd be better to 'stick it out' as a nearly worthless cog, than to take a risky path home to what might be nothing anyhow.
Edit: a more useful video linked below explains that the authorities confiscated his passport. That would make it difficult to leave. Though I'd probably try anyway after a year of that.
ETA: I've read a few of these articles over the last year. There have been many similar cases because of covid. It seems to be completely normal practice for countries to refuse visas to ships' crew.
And if you work in international shipping it’s not very good for your career to be blacklisted from Egypt.
[1] https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/chief-mate-strand...
How is this not inhumane and cruel? I can understand confiscating someone's passport if that person is a criminal, but this? This is like Saudi Arabia taking the passports of its laborers.
It is insane that things like this happen, in 2021
I mean, if you're an American citizen heading home and you lose your passport on the walkway to board your plane in France... it's not like America's going to prevent you from entering, right?
Surely it's gonna take some time to verify who you are and fix the situation. But it's not like you're forever banned from your own country.
Leaving Egypt might have been too difficult logistically to pull off, but once he had I don't see any legal difficulty returning home.
Even so, US authorities do not just take "sorry fellow USicans, I lost my passport" at face value and will likely detain you until you are able to prove you are a citizen, and put you through quite a bit of extra screening and interrogation. Realistically it would be less of an issue for a white person with a bland American accent, since Border Patrol would probably let you call a lawyer or family member to bring a birth certificate. But I am quite sure an El Salvadoran-American who forgot his passport would not be able to enter the US from Mexico without incredible legal difficulty - again to the point where it would be faster and considerably less traumatizing to just go to a consulate and wait a few weeks.
Shipping companies regularly do this to their crew, abandoning them when the costs of properly managing the situation aren’t worth it to them. Note that ship abandonment is also what led to the devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
Well, obviously nobody would volunteer unless things were going to change.
But surely the ships operating company had violated their operating agreement, giving the owner grounds to "evict" them, find a new operator, get the updated safety equipment and classification certificates, and pay for the fuel. Once that was done surely the ship would be unseized, and with a new crew installed, Egypt ought to be happy to cancel the guardianship.
This was all especially true back before it ran aground.
It would also seem like this all would be very much in the owner's interest as letting the ship decay cannot be good for the ships value, and they probably were not getting paid rent by the current operator for this.
But I'm guessing there is a lot more to this that the BBC article has left out.
> Meanwhile, at the Iranian port of Assaluyeh, 19 mostly Indian crew members of the bulk carrier Ula are on hunger strike after their vessel was abandoned by its owners in July 2019.
The way the world's maritime shipping system works is really screwed up.
https://www.stableseas.org/blue-economy/explosion-beirut-sea...
That's a business idea, start an office offering ship custodians for shipping companies. When they get in trouble they can hire your custodian instead of stranding one of their own employees far from home.
But with policy changes one can imagine a future where sailors prefer employers who have a contract with ship custodians before signing up with them, thereby voting with their employment.
I found the article to be really poor actually. It seems a lot of details were left out, possibly for maximum effect at editorializing the situation.
And if your employer owes you a salary can you sell the ship for scrap to recover salary? -- I'm guessing suck tricks would require a fancy lawyer.
A bit of hacking, some solar panels, a few stereos, tents, some poker chips, a rock band's visit... how long before the authorities would force him off? How many bitcoins would have he raked? (OK this is thinking different in a slightly hollywoodesque way... still)
cheers!
https://www.reuters.com/article/emirates-oil-tanker-int-idUS...
Now, whose hell is hotter?
This world is definitly a ship of damned and fools.
Now that's a sad piece of information I read today.
> He was legally obliged to stay aboard
What the actual fuck?
So Egypt has some sort of law, that allows the government to imprison people who have committed no crime indefinitely?
Shawshank Redemption style. Eroding the hull from inside and letting rust do the rest.
"was able to swim ashore every few days". Ok, swim ashore, hitchhike to the next city, try to cross a border. Border to Israel looks tricky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_barrier
Worst case, go to Sudan or something. Apply for Asylum, get deported.
After 4 years of deferred maintenance the engines are going to need some TLC before they can be fired up again. The longer the ship sits idle the worse the situation becomes. Left long enough and some fitting somewhere will corrode through or be damaged in a storm and without power to run the pumps the ship will start slowly sinking.
Similarly (and tragically) the Syrian government is not known for its compassion towards its distressed citizens.
[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/Eg...
The US gets a green square and a high rank, smaller countries are corrupt and unfair. I could fill up paragraphs about how corrupt and dysfunctional our (US) legal and political systems are. Meanwhile I spent a long time in Central Africa (a red square country) and know to compare.
I don’t get the purpose of these rankings.
I’m from Africa, have left now, and this is pure nonsense.
The USA doesn’t have to be literally perfect for it to be a good place.
It’s vastly better to a degree that left me totally mindfucked for years after I moved to the first world.
I trust your observations of where you came from but I believe this is over-generalizing to places you may not have personal experience with.
Property rights are an especially important tool when it comes to the operation of a materially wealthy society. But their imposition does not somehow guarantee that a society is more just or fair and less corrupt than any other.
Edit: I looked up the figures in my notes. The paper involved all Supreme Court cases involving the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The court struck down 232 state laws, 179 of the decisions were in favor of corporations, 55 were in favor of the growing railroads and 9 were in favor of individual black petitioners.
The paper isn't online and I don't have access to it anymore to check but I believe it is this paper.
"Protecting Corporations Instead of the Poor" by Alec Karakatsanis in Harvard Law Review 275.
By contrast, especially in Central Africa, the borders on the map are largely aspirational on the part of the governments. Even the word “Democratic” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a bad joke. The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
I would argue this is a false statement. There are pockets of instability there, especially near Goma and Virunga or very rural areas. The last few years especially have been unstable. But if you look at the country as a whole (which is the size of all Western Europe) over the last 15 years, the size of the territory not controlled by the internationally recognized legitimate government has been very small.
But a better test is this: would you go for a drive there with your family? Would you invest billions in a multi-decade mining project there - if you had to depend on the government’s version of law & order only?
1) It varies far too much from country to country to generalize in this way.
2) Justice is patchy and even across many areas of law depending on where you are.
Other aspects are much worse.
Also, most legal systems are generally good for this purpose, you just have to use your money judiciously in bribes instead of lawyer's fees.
I have not seen the lack of low level corruption in the states compared to other countries. Like in other countries they simply confine their corruption to those powerless to do anything about it.
Also, I’m low-key wondering if I should start handing the cop my wallet. They never give me a warning, maybe if they got some money out of the interaction they’d start...
Not judging, just curious.
If for example you consider lobbying=corruption (in many countries it is), then the US should indeed be many rankings below.
As someone involved in law in the US, the US is really good at these types of things. People, including Americans who have lived here their entire lives, are consistently amazed when they learn the power of the court and how functional it all has managed to be.
I share your concern for corruption in the US, but I submit that you have lost your sense of proportion. The US is not -- by any stretch of the imagination -- anything less than "mostly not corrupt".
US has been given a surprisingly high score while France and Italy are way below China!
There seems to be quite a lot of bias in this kind of scoring.
Man considering the scale here that's horrific.
But I guess that would explain a process here where they seem to punish someone... 'just because', and with no value coming from the process at all.
It's just injustice for no reason at all.... I can understand corruption to some extent. They get something, but punish this guy for no value, I don't get it.
So there is very clear value in it. If the harm is disregarded.
It seems that the lack of compassion that Egypt has for its neighbors will be repaid in kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
I’ll do it for $10M/year, paid in advance of course due to the company’s financial situation. Oh, he probably means for whatever meager wages they were paying this guy. Yeah, no wonder.
Meanwhile HN commenters be moaning every time their scrollbar is hijacked by a link or they have to deal with spaghetti code at work like "I'm so burned out"