Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

Is there something that could be done by people otherwise uninvolved - like myself, or my fellow HN readers - to help the other ~250 people who are currently stuck in similar situations?

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

View on HN

Ah, here’s the IMO database entry on the MV Aman. It provides much additional context. https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.details?p_...

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.

This seems like pretty important information if correct. A huge portion of the HN discussion is moot if the Mr. Aisha chose to remain. Seems like he could have continued his fight for the outstanding wages elsewhere.

I totally disagree. Based on sibling comments it seems like some people think this would have legally screwed up his claim to the lost wages, and even if not, giving up your only leverage in this situation is probably not the optimal strategy.

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.

My point was that "I have no legal way to leave" is a different scenario than "I won't leave until I get paid".

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.

Depending on thtle situation, there is little to no difference between "I have no legal way to leave" and "I have no legal way to leave and be paid for my work".

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.

As opposed to spending four years on the boat, then leaving without getting paid? Cut your losses, man.

What "leverage"?

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.

If I understood that correctly, "chose to remain" because if he didn't, he would lose his claim for wages for the time he was stuck on the ship. That's a fair amount of money.

Sure if that is the case, it is not a good trade-off. But that is a much different situation than the one that was communicated by the reporting, which suggested he had no legal way to leave.

I'm still not sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.

This article says local officials were also holding his passport so that he couldn’t legally leave: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/chief-mate-strand...

I wonder if embassies can intervene under these conditions, when a foreign government will not release passport.

They can, but will they? It is really tricky to handle this type of thing without declaring war. It's is also tricky for the other country to do this without getting war declared on them.

I thought this video was pretty clarifying, including words from Aisha himself: https://youtu.be/1zD-KjuGuiM

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.

From reading the article, they just for some legal reason need a person on board the ship.

So maybe people could volunteer to replace them on a rolling schedule.

In this particular instance, that seems to be the case. I imagine there are probably legal hurdles that needed to be overcome to even make that happen, but I’m glad it did.

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.

Sounds like a joke but turning them into airbnb would probably end up being pretty popular. Who wouldn't want an entire ship to themself for a night?

For me, it would depend on how stabby the ship is.

(I don't want to get injured by a ship in disrepair)

The Egyptian law is ridiculous. The government should hire coast guard staff to supervise the boat.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but I don’t have the ability to easily influence that. I might have the ability to make people’s lives easier in similar situations.

I wonder if there is any value in supervising the boat if it has no power... No power means no engines, no lights and no radios. That means even if the boat was robbed, there is nothing the supervisor could do about it.

I assume the purpose of holding someone physically accountable is to make it harder to use countries as ship parking lots

"Where is what ship? Oh, after 180 days we let the national guard boys play target practice with the ships that go unclaimed."

> they just for some legal reason need a person on board the ship

So what if the guy in question doesn't show up?

could be a great airbnb

Reply on news.ycombinator.com