SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This is a book about how international law can be used to ensure a better protection of people at sea. The fundamental premise of the book is that international law provides numerous structural, procedural, and substantive rules that can be used towards this aim. These particular rules derive primarily from international human rights law and the law of the sea, as well as from other fields of international law, including maritime law, labour law, and refugee law. The book discusses in depth how these rules regulate the scope of State duties towards people at sea, as well as how they affect the content of these duties, adapting generic human rights requirements to the special nature of the marine environment. All of these rules can be conceptualized as a sui generis special regime of international law, the overarching principle of which is the duty of States to protect people at sea and to adopt all necessary acts with a view towards ensuring enjoyment of their rights. This novel approach advocates a systemic reading of international law and advances the proposal that a new regime is emerging in this area. Using insights from theories of conflict of norms and regime interaction, it presents an analytical framework within which to examine the relationships between different rules of international law, expounding the conceptual potential of thinking in terms of regimes and in terms of the system and the ability of international law to produce countless functional legal regimes.