Op-Ed: The Week in Review: Respect for Human Life

Until last week I’d never heard of Seafood Week, and I’d never heard of Sergei Magnitsky either. There’s a connection, and that is the maritime industry’s respect for human life.

Seafood Week is a marketing promotion. Its aim is to get more people to eat more fish. The commercial maritime world follows a long-held tradition in its dealings with the fishing industry, namely, the safety of people at sea. The rescue of all people in distress is an obligation under international maritime law and a long-established humanitarian duty that seafarers take seriously.

Seafarers often help fishers. This month saw two examples: The container ship NYK Joanna rescued seven fishermen in distress off the coast of the Philippines, and the bulk carrier Kavala Seas rescued another seven a week later.

World Food Day and the release of the 2015 Global Hunger Index fell within Seafood Week. The maritime industry is pivotal to human survival. As the International Chamber of Shipping says, “About 90 percent of world trade is carried by the international shipping industry. Without shipping, the import/export of affordable food and goods would not be possible - half the world would starve, and the other half would freeze!” 

War and conquest have long been the drivers of mass starvation, and despite progress in reducing hunger worldwide, hunger levels in 52 of 117 countries in the 2015 Global Hunger Index remain “serious” (44 countries) or “alarming” (eight countries). An average of 42,500 people per day fled their homes last year. Approximately 59.5 million people are displaced by conflict worldwide, more than ever before. 

A front-page article in the Danish newspaper Børsen last week claimed that Danish shipping companies are not taking due responsibility for migrants. These people are often attempting to escape war, human rights abuses and starvation, and they are too often dumped in shipping lanes by their human traffickers. 

There is no truth to the accusations made by Børsen, says the Danish Shipowners’ Association and the European Community Shipowners’ Associations (ECSA) and, as stated in the article, this year alone merchant mariners saved 15,643 migrants in 137 rescue operations. 

According to Børsen, shipowners should ensure that seafarers and their vessels are ready to handle migrants on board their ships. The report called for additional training for seafarers as well as new equipment on board.

The shipowners take their traditional duty seriously, but they see other solutions to the tragic plight of migrants at sea. According to ECSA, the only sustainable solution is for Frontex, the E.U. body that coordinates European border management, to have the necessary resources to support merchant vessels.

Among those taking their life-saving responsibility to heart by rescuing migrants at sea was NYK. On July 14, Hermes Leader, a car carrier operated by NYK Line, rescued 336 people in the Mediterranean.

Last month, NYK become a member of the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN), a global business network that works for a corruption-free industry, and here the relevance of Sergei Magnitsky becomes clearer. Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian tax lawyer who, on uncovering a multimillion dollar embezzlement scam, was thrown into one of Russia’s worst detention centers. 

Magnitsky was a 37-year-old husband and father working for an American firm in Moscow. He blew the whistle on the largest known tax fraud in Russian history. Denied visitors, denied health care and beaten with rubber batons, he died a slow and agonizing death. People are only allowed to be held in the detention center for a year. Magnitsky died after 358 days.

Some estimates place the total cost of corruption globally at more than five percent of global GDP each year, about $2.6 trillion. The 2015 Global Enforcement Report, published annually by TRACE International, an organization trying to advance commercial transparency worldwide, summarizes recent worldwide trends in corruption and anti-bribery enforcement:
 
 * An increasing number of countries are focusing on bribery of their own government officials.
 * U.S. regulators continue to have non-U.S. companies in their sights.
 * Anti-bribery enforcement actions are highest in China, Iraq, Nigeria, India, Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia.
 * The extractive industries continue to have the highest number of anti-bribery enforcement actions worldwide.

Magnitsky died of heart failure in 2009. His treatment sparked international indignation, and U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act (the “Magnitsky Act”) into law in 2012. The Magnitsky Act imposed sanctions on Russian officials involved in his death. The blacklisted individuals are barred from entering the U.S. and from using U.S. banks.

TRACE put Magnitsky in the news again last week to highlight the U.S. Congress’s latest bill, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (the “Global Magnitsky Bill”), which if passed would expand the scope of the Magnitsky Act to cover human rights violators and corrupt officials around the world. 

The Global Magnitsky Bill would cover any foreign national involved in extrajudicial killings, corruption, torture or any other gross violation of human rights. It would prohibit or revoke U.S. visas for these foreign nationals and freeze their U.S. financial assets.

What would passage of the Global Magnitsky Bill mean for the international maritime community? According to TRACE, blanket sanctions have strong trade implications and the propensity to sour diplomatic relations. However, although the Global Magnitsky Bill has a global reach, it is tailored in nature, targeting specific bad actors and holding them individually accountable. This duality means it could temper diplomatic fallout while at the same time providing a strong instrument to check human rights atrocities and ensure accountability.

The maritime industry has seen its share of large-scale corruption allegations. The Petrobras scandal has already seen tens of executives charged, and, last week, Sevan Drilling was accused of breaches of the Norwegian Criminal Code in respect of payments made in connection with drilling contracts awarded by Petrobras. 

Also last week, Hanjiang Intermediate People's Court in central China sentenced Jiang Jiemin, former chairman of the state-run China National Petroleum Corporation, to 16 years in prison for accepting 14 million yuan ($2.3 million) in bribes and failing to explain the source of another 15 million yuan.

The whistleblowers in these cases have not met the same fate as Magnitsky, and with the help of the Global Magnitsky Bill, such people potentially face a more secure future, making the bill another step towards respecting the value of human life.