Seven stowaways and a hijacked oil tanker
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair
> The Children Overboard affair was an Australian political controversy involving public allegations by Howard Government ministers in the lead-up to the 2001 federal election, that seafaring asylum seekers had thrown children overboard in a presumed ploy to secure rescue and passage on 7 October 2001.
Or had they?
> The Australian Senate Select Committee for an inquiry into a certain maritime incident later found that no children had been at risk of being thrown overboard and that the government had known this prior to the election. The government was criticised for misleading the public and cynically "(exploiting) voters' fears of a wave of illegal immigrants by demonising asylum-seekers".
- You're supposed to disclose stowaways are on board. If you don't, or if you help them get to land secretly, you'll be fired and possibly jailed for smuggling illegal immigrants.
- Once you disclose stowaways are on board, countries are free to refuse you permission to dock. Since nobody wants stowaways, this potentially means you can't dock anywhere.
- You have limited supplies on board. It doesn't make financial sense for your company to feed you indefinitely. Have the company send boats to take the employees off and letting the ship drift on the open sea until the refugees die of starvation seems inhumane, very expensive, and may open the ship to being claimed by someone as abandoned property.
So maybe your options are commit one crime or another (Option A: Help the refugees, commit immigration smuggling, Option B: File a false police report, let the police take the refugees off your hands).
If you do Option A and get caught, it's a simple factual matter to prove you assisted in illegal immigration. If you do Option B, it's pretty hard to prove you knowingly filed a false report; how exactly do you prove the refugees never said "Send us to shore or we'll attack," or that you didn't actually feel threatened? And even if you do, if your company's in on the plan, they can assign you to a different part of the world; the arrest warrant might never catch up with you.
And as the article mentions, there's always Option C: Set the refugees adrift on a lifeboat in the middle of nowhere, they'll probably die. This seems to be morally equivalent to murder, and quite black compared to Option A or Option B. (I don't know enough of maritime law to be sure how the legal system would interpret your actions in this case.)