If a cruise delivers a floating town, then the captain is its mayor. But with regards to law and order, there’s no police pressure and no courts. That can leave sufferers of crime aboard the ship unprotected, as it is not clear which legal guidelines practice. A case of sexual attack aboard a Mediterranean cruise ship, the remaining week, highlighted that prison ambiguity. At the same time, a Spanish court decided to release the detained suspect after the ship docked in Valencia. The court declared that Spain had no jurisdiction in the case because the alleged crime turned into said to have taken place in global waters, in line with a report using the Spanish newspaper Levante.
If Spain can not prosecute, then which one? S. Can?
“There’s no reduce-and-dried rule,” said Frederick Kenney, the director of felony affairs and outside relations for the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency responsible for international shipping safety.
“There isn’t any worldwide law that covers this case in the meantime,” he stated. Maritime law establishes that a ship is subject to the legal guidelines of us of a whose flag it flies. But for tax reasons and different felony benefits, few cruise ships are flagged with the nations of their home port, or maybe their corporate headquarters.
In the Spanish case, the suspect changed into detained aboard the MSC Divina, which flies a Panamanian flag and is in theory to Panama’s legal guidelines. In practice, we won’t have the resources to research crimes that take place a long way from its beaches.
But other legal guidelines in the area need to have covered the sufferer, stated Aleksandra Ivankovic, the deputy director of Victim Support Europe, a victims’ rights organization.
