I'm not entirely understanding this. If the ships are genuinely abandoned, what stops the crew from making them their own and/or selling them? Is it simply the paperwork or what?
They also usually haven't been paid for that time. So they are motivated to stay (usually under deplorable conditions) because of the chance that the new owners will give them their back pay.
Sometimes the local community will ferry food out to the crews. But if the ship runs out of fuel to power the generators they'll be without air conditioning and more importantly - navigation lights to show they're anchored.
https://www.counton2.com/news/local-news/charleston-communit...
At minimum, it would be fair to mandate that port countries provide visas for the sole purposes of mariners transiting back home, at the mariners' discretion.
You're not going to keep someone from staying on a boat if they think they're going to get paid... but you can at least resolve the international red tape that prohibits them from choosing to leave the boat.
They did not generate the problem, get no profit from resolving the problem, and actually end up footing the bill for the problem from some random irresponsible owner.
The only reason they don’t just sink them is because of the PR backlash - and that would end up costing them even more in weapons and cleanup.
It’s more like someone abandoning random RVs in your town - full of orphans. Just, ugh. What a nightmare for everyone.
It seems inhumane from an ethical perspective to essentially maroon a person on an abandoned ship, simply because it's slightly more convenient.
The authorities doing anything besides arresting the owners is just enabling more owners doing the same thing and dumping the mess on their doorstep. Bad policy.
The owners obviously. The local authorities through inaction.
My point is there's functionally no difference (and arguably, one which benefits the owners) by stranding crew on abandoned ships. Either way you're left with an abandoned ship.
So why not avoid the human tragedy?
Doing what you propose just creates a huge moral hazard, and would result in even more of this kind of BS on their doorstep.
That seems like a serious devaluing of human life.
An abstract goal isn't a justification for a concrete ill.
Are you a taxpayer in any of the jurisdictions involved? Do you own any of these boats?
Are you going to fly over there and solve this problem yourself individually?
Near as I can tell, you’re just moralizing about how other people should solve the problems created by the ship owners without doing anything to actually solve the problem, and with no skin in the game.
Same as me, of course. But I’m trying to explain the reasoning of the folks with skin in the game.
It’s easy to be high and mighty when it isn’t your actual problem, and you don’t have to pay for it.
Different matter in countries that generally try to be more decent to people...
... but in this case (per your reasoning) are looking the other way past human suffering to make sure that shipowners don't have more incentive to dump boats.
I'm saying "That's a shitty moral justification for causing human suffering."
Are you saying you think it's a good one, per your personal opinion? Or that you don't, but it doesn't matter because you're not a minister of transportation?
> Abandoned ships are sometimes so old and worn that “even the scrap guys lose money stripping it of anything of value,” said Eric White, a ship inspector for the International Transport Workers’ Federation, or ITF, a seafarers’ union.
> Left hanging by Teeters were the ships’ crews of mostly Ukrainian seafarers, who suddenly had no way of sending money to families back home in what was now a war zone after Russia’s invasion. In total, the 22 men were owed $130,000 covering more than three months, White said. If not for $22,000 in donations from local seafarers’ charities, none of them would have made it off the ship and back home, according to White.
Marine law is optimized for the well-being of ship owners, not anyone else.