If your livelihood depends on shipping, being unable to return to Egypt likely represents a significant barrier to obtaining future employment. Also, he may just have been extradited back to Egypt by another government.
As he said in the article, it is because he has no intention of abandoning his profession and will resume working, meaning if he had left the ship his career would been ruined.
He was on a ship, alone, with no power/sanitation etc.
How is this not inhumane and cruel? I can understand confiscating someone's passport if that person is a criminal, but this? This is like Saudi Arabia taking the passports of its laborers.
It is insane that things like this happen, in 2021
I'm curious, if he did manage to get on a ship surely he'd be able to return home to Syria on a ship bound there?
I mean, if you're an American citizen heading home and you lose your passport on the walkway to board your plane in France... it's not like America's going to prevent you from entering, right?
Surely it's gonna take some time to verify who you are and fix the situation. But it's not like you're forever banned from your own country.
Leaving Egypt might have been too difficult logistically to pull off, but once he had I don't see any legal difficulty returning home.
According to US law (and I am assuming Syrian law) that is true...assuming the government is stable and the country doesn't have a devastating stalemated civil war. Getting into Syria with a legal passport is difficult enough, and Syrian border officials would have good reason to suspect that he was a foreigner. He would likely be thrown on a plane to Cairo and told to figure it out at the Syrian embassy. Although now that I write it out maybe this wouldn't have been a terrible option (albeit Kafkaesque and prone to several bureaucratic failures - and it doesn't solve the problem of him "abandoning his post" and breaking Egyptian law).
Even so, US authorities do not just take "sorry fellow USicans, I lost my passport" at face value and will likely detain you until you are able to prove you are a citizen, and put you through quite a bit of extra screening and interrogation. Realistically it would be less of an issue for a white person with a bland American accent, since Border Patrol would probably let you call a lawyer or family member to bring a birth certificate. But I am quite sure an El Salvadoran-American who forgot his passport would not be able to enter the US from Mexico without incredible legal difficulty - again to the point where it would be faster and considerably less traumatizing to just go to a consulate and wait a few weeks.
He would be a fugitive. Not everyone wants to do that. People in the US sometimes get jailed for years without conviction pending a trail. Why don’t they break out and leave the country? Because that would be a worse situation.
I saw this video from Chief MAKOi (who has an excellent youtube channel in general) about this situation a week ago. It seemed rather hopeless for him at the time considering that it was going on for four years already. I wonder if that video contributed to pressure to fix the situation, it does have almost a million views.
In the article it states that he started swimming to shore only after the ship had run aground a few hundred meters from the shore. So the question remains, how did he sustain himself beforehand? Did the ship have years worth of supplies for him on board?
I was wondering the same thing, since the ship had no power either perishables would go bad quickly, also where did he get money to buy food later on? Was it his savings?
The article names 2019 as when he totally ran out of fuel. I assume there were previously enough rations on board (it was stocked for an entire crew before being abandoned), and perhaps he made a deal with the visiting guard to bring food.
It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.
If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable.
Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.
A lot of shipping issues are complicated because we have no global government and we have a lot of international waters and shipping, by its very nature, tends to involve ships passing from one legal jurisdiction to another repeatedly.
It's not about not wanting to offend wealthy people. It's in part a matter of "Who has authority here?"
There's a lot I don't understand about it, but this seems like it's probably a fairly modern development and it's high time we created meaningful solutions so this cannot happen again.
Glad to see he got free and a reporter was talking to him and he was broadcasting via internet. But that should not be how something like this gets resolved, on some kind of ad hoc basis after so long.
And someone here said someone volunteered to take his place, so it's apparently not really resolved, though he got relief.
I don't know how collateral on a mortgage on a ship this size works. But I am pretty sure even if they handed it to him, he couldn't do anything with it because it would have a Lein on it.
Lein’s don’t normally work that way after a boat was seized. Handing it to the remaining sailor isn’t identical, but don’t assume loans have much weight here.
The mess of US civil forfeiture laws originally showed up in maritime law such that the owners and outstanding loans became irrelevant. In effect the physical object is what’s confiscated breaking any ties to anyone that had a prior ownership stake.
Isn't there a law at sea where if you find an abandoned ship, it is basically yours? Perhaps this law doesn't apply in Egyptian national waters?
If he is the legal guardian of the ship, why wouldn't he be able to just sell it for profit and move on? Was it just that there would be no buyer for it, even to scrap it? Or could there have been fines/liens on that ship such that no one would want to buy it? If that is the case it seems odd that he couldn't himself abandon the ship to the lien holders.
International salvage law is complex, but essentially no. The ship is stills owned.by someone even when at the bottom of the sea and if you take anything from the ship without permission that is theft.
Salvagers work on contract with the owners in most cases. When they don't there are generally big lawsuits because they are entitled for compensation for their work, but if they don't give anything brought up back the the owners they are in possession of stolen property, and the law around this is complex.
If the vessel is more than 1000 years old we probably can't trace an onwer anymore and you can get by with calling it abandoned in some cases. Though even here the country who's waters it is in might consider the wreck a treasure.
He is the guard, not the owner. As such he can't sell it. The owners are probably in complex bankruptcy court and the lien holders will eventually get to figure out what to do with it, but that will take years to resolve. Indeed the expense of resolving this might be more than the ship is worth so nobody actually wants to resolve it.
The company also owes him a salary, he is in possession of company property, selling said property to recuperate lost salary seems reasonable.
I'm no lawyer (so don't try this at home), and I bet you'd need to find a good lawyer to get a with a trick like that :)
But as a creditor in possession of property owned by the debitor, selling said property to recuperate losses doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Certainly, not if debitor does not take action recover possession of the property, etc.
Even if he got into trouble after selling the ship, I would hope a jury would side the person being held for "ransom by said property".
But yes, between Egyptian and Syrian courts, I suppose there is a serious risk you'll get squashed either way. Because we can't have sailors selling their ships :)
Depends. If the Navy lost then the winner might own them. Reciently the remains of WWI ships that Germany scuttled so they couldn't be captured, went on eBay (the ships were intured in an English harbor at the time). They are considered a public attraction, so the owner won't be allowed to do anything other than grant permission to visiting divers.
The ship looked quite large. I would imagine scrappers in Turkey or Pakistan would have paid well, considering the price of steel. But you'd need investors to pay for transport and any Egyptian fees. And to secure investors you'd need to resolve property rights, at least tentatively, to the point the ship could be released, likely requiring some experienced maritime lawyer able to work quickly to avoid getting bogged down in litigation.
I bet there would be significant profit in it, at least from the perspective of a handful of individuals, and especially if things could be arranged to make the sailor judgment proof--e.g. have his share of any proceeds go to family members--so free loaders (i.e. lazy ship owners, clients, and insurers) couldn't swoop in at the end to claim any proceeds. But it's not just a matter of profit; it's a matter of opportunity costs. All the parties most capable of pulling this off clearly felt there was moreprofit to be had by walking away and pursuing other opportunities.
Surely people on HN understand this phenomenon: there are an infinite number of profitable opportunities out there, but some are better than others, and there's only a finite amount of time and capital.
Yeah I don't understand what value there is here in assigning it to the crew member who apparently can't decline?
Even if he could manage the ship, a random crew member is highly unlikely to have resources to care for a ship like that... what value is there in assigning him this responsibility? They just punishing someone for the sake of it?
If the poster meant “people legally designated as fathers” and was referring to, e.g., the presumption (conclusive in some jurisdictions) of paternity based on marriage at time of birth, its not completely senseless.
I think his job was basically security guard for the property. Also, if the ship were to come unmoored and collide with another vessel they would need someone to blame.
Preventing unmooring probably requires to repaint/reoil the moor every few months to prevent rust. I wonder whether 1 person is enough to take care of the remaining maintenance of a wreck: electrical boards, meals, rats... Crews are also constantly repainting the hull while at sea, this is why it still takes 20 crew on top of a captain to man a ship.
I'm sure he had no supplies for basic maintenence, but the law still requires someone to hold accountable so it would be him.
It would be interesting if this did happen and the court found him guilty of dereliction of duty for not conjuring replacement parts out of thin air. Would he be sent to a land prison or back to the prison of the ship?
But why can't he quit? If the owning company didn't assign another guard that's their fault, not the guard. Imagine if a chauffeur was forever assigned to a car because it broke on a disabled parking place. It would just get towed and the bill or court order sent to the actual owner and the chauffeur can quit.
100% blame on Egypt here for a stupid rule ignoring consequences.
> Yeah I don't understand what value there is here in assigning it to the crew member who apparently can't decline?
The article doesn't state it really explicitly but I believe he was able to decline but maybe not aware of when that decision would need to be made - specifically this passage here:
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative [of the shipping company] told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
> Mohammed, they said, should never have signed the order in the first place.
It sounds like he signed a thing without fully understanding the ramifications of it - some eygptian official might have pulled a sneaky to trick him into signing it without full knowledge of the consequences or he may have simply acted unwisely but, either way, I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him (for instance, one of the actual owners could've stepped up and owned their error), or provided clear guidance and legal advice to the crew members.
The fact that the captain GTFO'd before any of this really started to go down really reinforces that this guy was left holding the short end of the stick and the company itself is pretty insanely slimy for not, at least, attempting to continue to support him.
Swimming to shore to get fresh water is a seriously messed up scenario.
>I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him
Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation. The problem is almost entirely with the Egyptian authorities. Such a situation shouldn't even be possible to develop. The first mate in the article might not have understood the ramifications of what he signed, but the Egyptian court certainly did.
There are all kinds of reasons for why a shipping company would be unable to help. That doesn't mean it should leave a person in a legal limbo. That's on the country rather than the company.
I'm surprised the guy didn't just leave. A country whose laws don't respect you doesn't deserve respect in return.
>Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation.
The CEO was the right person to to replace him immediately until they could make it a sufficiently attractive proposition that someone else would want to do it. You know by the usual means. Pay, supply drops, fuel for power etc.
The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form. It's so bad I would have no issue with the company being blacklisted as a criminal organisation.
>The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form.
And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared? Then what? There could be any number of reasons why a company might be unable to do what they need to do. The guy is still stuck there then, because it all rests on the shipping company rather than the country whose government is holding him there.
Running and hiding when insolvency hits is illegal in most places. But sure, it's certainly possible that this has happened to his employer while that company who employ him is still providing quotes about it being impossible to find anyone who would take his place but not paying him either.
So in insolvency that is deemed bankruptcy the assets of the company are traditionally used to deal with as much of the liabilities of the company as they can in rank order of those liabilities. You know secured debt ranks ahead of unsecured etc.
This guy's claim on the assets of the company to get him out of that hell, for me, rank number 1, and alone. Next comes the wages due all employees not deprived of their liberty. And that's the usual way it is done too.
I'm not talking about this specific instance. I'm saying that companies can fail to do something due to myriad reasons. You shouldn't tie a third party's freedom (the ship's "legal guardian") to a company behaving correctly. If the company doesn't deal with the jeopardy a person is in then governments should try to resolve it in a reasonable timeframe or at least create reasonable accommodations until the situation is resolved.
Nup. Not even close. Choosing to dump your employee in hell is /wrong/. There is no excuse in this instance or any. There's a different choice you can make so make it. The end. The local laws that are a necessary condition for your employee being retained in hell are simply not interesting if you have the choice to get them out of hell. It is clear that this is a choice. But sure, the company could also agitate for legal reform in Egypt once they secured the liberty of their employee. That's a responsible thing to do.
Then if a company has behaved abysmally by choosing to dump their employee in hell then the law needs to be involved on those making that decision. Absolutely. There needs to be consequences for making that /choice/. As was clearly made in this instance assuming the accuracy of the report.
>And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared?
If the company did well instead of go bankrupt who is cashing the biggest check? That is who is responsible. Work your way down that list until you find someone, everyone you can't find is a fugitive and has their assets seized.
Then whoever was second in command at the company sells off the ship (probably at a loss) and uses some of the money to send the first officer home. If they can't afford to keep the ship then they shouldn't sit on the title and trap one of their own employees in a derelict floating prison.
I'm really unfamiliar with maritime laws but I wouldn't be surprised if seizing unmanned boats that are flying the flags of a different country but within your waters is somehow a touchy international grey-zone.
This situation was created by the country essentially leaving a 4k tonne vessel derelict off the coast of Eygpt after failing to pay to fuel its ride home so there isn't going to be an easy answer here. It might be that the company had some act-of-god like circumstance happen (like an employee fraudulently embezzling funds and tampering with a fuel gauge to make it look like the ship had far more fuel than it did though... that's insanely unlikely given how shifty everyone is acting).
Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation (which would likely be a large asset loss for the company).
I really don't think Egypt is likely the worst actor in this situation but it was cruel what they put this man through. Ideally the administrator trying to untangle this POS would realize this employee has essentially no power to resolve the situation and release them home - but his options to escape were likely pretty few.
If you're a passing ship the last thing you want to do is piss off Egypt since the country is pretty corrupt and controls the Suez Canal (which you plan on sailing through if your ship is anywhere in the neighborhood) - getting on their bad side is likely a one-way ticket to random inspections and tariffs or an outright ban and the only land close enough for the man to flee to was Egypt itself - so he'd need to sneakily emigrate... he's heading back to Syria so that means he'd need to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border under the radar and potentially without a passport - and probably with very little cash.
I really feel for this dude when he says he was struggling with depression because his situation was utterly screwed - the universe really wasn't on his side.... buuuut, I think the company owning the ship comes out the worst. The article doesn't have the details but something seriously slimy was going on there.
>Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation
Removing a ship could cause an international incident, but forcing a person to stay alone on a ship without proper living conditions for years wouldn't? Imagine if the guy wasn't Syrian, but was an American instead. This would've either been resolved quickly or there would've been an international incident that would've put the removal of a ship to shame.
Yea, additionally, the guy was staying on the boat unpaid for the duration - so it's a lot easier to read their actions as pure greed.
There's also a good chance they could've declared the ship lost at sea and either scuttled it or offered it for a dollar (or other token currency amount) to salvage companies.
I might be misunderstanding the situation, but it sounds like the original captain knew what was going on and sacrificed Mohammed for his own freedom. I assume the captain has original responsibility in this case. The captain left the ship and never came back. He presumably told Egyptians that his first officer is now in charge, or the Egyptians boarded the ship and determined that the First Officer was the highest ranking official on the ship.
Either way it sounds like the Captain probably knew what was going on. When the Captain learned that the parent company had ran out of money, he probably was aware of these cases of seafarer abandonment and decided he didn't want to be one of them. So he left the ship, leaving the responsibility on Mohammed.
Mohammed claimed he didn't really know the meaning of this responsibility until everyone else started disembarking. It sounds like by then the captain had been gone, for at least 4 months, and potentially longer.
The Captain sacrificed Mohammed here. Either way, someone was going to be abandoned on that vessel. I think the Captain saw the writing on the wall and abandoned quickly, shifting responsibility onto someone else.
There are lots of people at fault here. Egyptian authorities, Tyson Shipping and Marine Company (which seems to have continued operating despite all this), and the Captain. Unfortunately Mohammed is one of the innocent ones caught in the middle. He shouldn't have signed the paper as the shipping company is quick to point out. But that doesn't resolve the real issue. It would have just meant the Captain or someone else would have been forced into this situation.
The problem was that this man >>signed<< a document where he agreed to be "legally bound to this ship"... So be careful before you are signing something...
Alternatively - if you're not in the Eygptian legal system - be careful of trying to make someone sign something they don't comprehend - in the US at best the contract will be invalidated and at worst you might be held responsible for any damages if it was your job to clearly communicate the rights the parties had w.r.t. the contract before signing.
That all said - that's a hard battle and one you're probably not going to win unless you a) don't be speak english or b) don't have full control of your mental faculties - "I couldn't be arsed to read the contract" is generally not a defense unless the contract goes out of its way to be intentionally misleading.
You are putting way to much stock in "signing a document". Anybody can document an injustice, and make it feel "justified" - but that doesn't make it justified. If I were to convince someone to sign a document saying they have to work for me for free, I'm still a slaveholder. Pick which one - morality or legality - there is no way that document should have been held as valid for longer than a few months, nor was there any way that document was morally ok
We don't know what the situation was here. It could even be that all the sailors were required to sign some standard-looking documentation (no idea what, agreement to terminate their contract with x% of salary, papers allowing them to enter Egypt) before leaving the ship, but he was given something that was different and bound him to the ship as its guardian. Your advice still stands of course.
> It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.
This doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves the problem around to the free market. What if no one wanted to buy it for scrap? Would he be responsible for cleaning up the situation himself? The court should have impounded the ship using Egypt's own coast guard and billed the company for the coast guard's time.
Suppose he did sell the ship, without proper authority, wouldn’t that be a civil matter between he and the owners? It was basically derelict, right? It seems like a salvage company could come in, pay any fines to Egypt, fuel the ship a d then drive it away and it would be theirs. That further incentives the owners to handle their business.
It would probably be difficult to find a salvage company willing to take on that much legal risk.
Maybe the guy could have made some calls down to Somalia and convinced some pirates that a big prize was ripe for the taking if they were willing to take a road trip?
Why would you write an article like this without a word describing the legal consequences of leaving the ship? What consequence would be worth four years of your life?
Edit: a more useful video linked below explains that the authorities confiscated his passport. That would make it difficult to leave. Though I'd probably try anyway after a year of that.
If they've got his passport and he can't leave the only option is Egypt. I expect he thought of that and they refused.
ETA: I've read a few of these articles over the last year. There have been many similar cases because of covid. It seems to be completely normal practice for countries to refuse visas to ships' crew.
I imagine that a legal system that forces a random guy to stay trapped on a ship for four years would do something worse to someone who defies their order.
I saw this video[1] on Youtube that goes a bit more in depth into the situation. Apparently after he became the legal guardian of the ship, the Egyptian govt took his passport to prevent him from leaving.
I would have had my brother dinghy out to me one of the passes.... I guess though since this is in a major shipping lane you'd probably get taken out by a ship.
If he had silently sneaked off the ship, would someone have noticed? How long would it take for anyone to notice that a ship without power and crewed by just 1 person was actually abandoned?
I was wondering about this. My guess (just a guess) was that since he wants to still work in this industry, he was afraid that abandoning the ship would hurt his career? Either that, or he's just an incredibly responsible person.
From the article, he did sneak off the ship routinely after it ran aground some years later. He would sneak off, buy food and recharge his phone, then return to the ship for some bizarre reason.
I believe he was allowed to go to shore. Unfortunately, the closest place is a restricted military area and he was only allowed to stay for 2 hours each visit. He cannot even sneak off as he is getting into a military base for food, water and power. If it has been a civilian area, he could have just stayed on the land.
It is a sad state of affairs, whichever way you look at it.
That region is experiencing a lot of chaos and I'd say that being alone on a ship is a lot safer than being alone with no passport and wanted by the law.
They don't care.
Just to let you know how bad are we treated. As a Syrian, I should exchange 100 dollars to enter the country. Some people were stuck at the border with Lebanon when that bill was issued and a woman died waiting for someone to bring her the 100 dollars (or 200 because he also needs to go back).
We pay 800 euros to get our 2 years of validity passports.
A couple of weeks ago, I had to wait from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. to get the embassy in Berlin to attest my signature on the passport.
I had to wait 4 hours to attest my papers at the totally empty embassy in Jakarta.
A random Syrian, or someone 'without passport' is not going to raise any scrutiny in Egypt. Just a few handfulls of cash could have expedited his way to at least Lebanon.
There's something odd about this story because neither a passport nor money should have kept him there, unless there was literally some kind of watch for him, and/or the cash situation was really that extremely dire. That said, he was able to survive for 4 years so money had to be coming from somewhere.
I suggest that he was maybe being paid a tiny amount, and that he felt it'd be better to 'stick it out' as a nearly worthless cog, than to take a risky path home to what might be nothing anyhow.
But he is determined. He says he is good at his job and wants nothing more than to pick up where he left off.
Meanwhile HN commenters be moaning every time their scrollbar is hijacked by a link or they have to deal with spaghetti code at work like "I'm so burned out"
The Egyptian legal system is not known for its fairness... the World Justice Project ranks it 125 of 128 surveyed countries, in last place out of 8 countries in the Middle East[1]
Similarly (and tragically) the Syrian government is not known for its compassion towards its distressed citizens.
Most people may think I’m being pessimistic and jaded. But I think these rankings are hilarious (in a bad sense). Just like the corruption rankings that come out.
The US gets a green square and a high rank, smaller countries are corrupt and unfair. I could fill up paragraphs about how corrupt and dysfunctional our (US) legal and political systems are. Meanwhile I spent a long time in Central Africa (a red square country) and know to compare.
Same. I help put deals together with some experience in SE Asia. The ability to enforce contract and property rights in the US, with ready access to the courts and relatively clear rules, sets the US apart in terms of business efficiency and predictability. In my assessment, it's a large part of what's made the US so prosperous. In contrast, dealing with corrupt officials in smaller countries in SE Asia is just wild.
Right the US has rule of law for businesses. What about poor people? Not so much. See: civil asset forfeiture, being jailed for petty fines you can’t afford to pay, insane fees used by low-tax jurisdictions to fund their courts.
Yes, the U.S. has gone to great length to ensure the smooth operation of business. In fact you might say this is essentially the primary purpose of U.S. legal system. As an example, one researcher looked at all the Supreme Court cases involving the 14th amendment between 1870 and 1940. The 14th amendment as you'll recall is an amendment focused on the individual equal protections people have under the law. I cannot recall the figures exactly, but of some 100+ cases ~70% pertained to business and around a dozen were focused on violations of individual's rights.
Property rights are an especially important tool when it comes to the operation of a materially wealthy society. But their imposition does not somehow guarantee that a society is more just or fair and less corrupt than any other.
Edit: I looked up the figures in my notes. The paper involved all Supreme Court cases involving the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The court struck down 232 state laws, 179 of the decisions were in favor of corporations, 55 were in favor of the growing railroads and 9 were in favor of individual black petitioners.
The paper isn't online and I don't have access to it anymore to check but I believe it is this paper.
"Protecting Corporations Instead of the Poor" by Alec Karakatsanis in Harvard Law Review 275.
Correct, the US has an excellent legal system for the maintenance of property and commerce, but from the human point of view it is a disaster. After all, just considering the maintenance of racial disparities at the judicial level over several decades will tell that this is not a functioning system.
Can you consider it such a "disaster" when so many from all around the world are desperate to move here? I realize that's kind of a cliche' right-wing talking point, but it still seems some relatively is merited.
People want to move because they need the jobs! As I said, the US has a great justice system for commercial enterprises. But from the human point of view it is a disaster.
You’re right. The US has predictable rules and outcomes and very civilization-friendly laws. It also has the power to enforce law & order within its own borders.
By contrast, especially in Central Africa, the borders on the map are largely aspirational on the part of the governments. Even the word “Democratic” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a bad joke. The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
> The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
I would argue this is a false statement. There are pockets of instability there, especially near Goma and Virunga or very rural areas. The last few years especially have been unstable. But if you look at the country as a whole (which is the size of all Western Europe) over the last 15 years, the size of the territory not controlled by the internationally recognized legitimate government has been very small.
We can argue about definiton of words like legitimate, control, and “very small”.
But a better test is this: would you go for a drive there with your family? Would you invest billions in a multi-decade mining project there - if you had to depend on the government’s version of law & order only?
You are making the assumption that "investing billions of dollars" is synonymous with all other forms of justice. During the Junta in Chile for example, you were very safe to invest. You were probably even safe to go for a drive. But the system was grotesque on the whole. I think the point people are trying to make is that
1) It varies far too much from country to country to generalize in this way.
2) Justice is patchy and even across many areas of law depending on where you are.
Not once, but multiple times I've had police simply steal cash from me in the states. Not civil forfeiture, but the cash in a wallet disappears on it's way to where it's held temporarily, no crimes involved. And from rich areas like Boulder, CO.
I have not seen the lack of low level corruption in the states compared to other countries. Like in other countries they simply confine their corruption to those powerless to do anything about it.
This exactly. In the US it is common for police to steal from citizens if they feel they can get away with it, I know many people who have had it happen to them personally, both with cash and possessions.
Did this happen at a traffic stop? Did you give them your wallet when they asked for your license? I don’t think I’ve ever given a cop my wallet. I take the ID out and hand that to them. If they asked me for the wallet, I would feel powerless to say no, I just have never been asked. I’m not defending the police here, this behavior is disgusting, just trying to understand the circumstances in which this occurred.
Also, I’m low-key wondering if I should start handing the cop my wallet. They never give me a warning, maybe if they got some money out of the interaction they’d start...
One example, at a large party during college, my wife's coat was stolen. The thieves took her credit cards, left the rest of the wallet, and dumped the coat on an unrelated house's front lawn. Unbenownst to the thieves, this house was owned by a professor who she was close with. He had searched the coat and found the cash in another pocket. When he was unable to reach her via cellphone, he took the coat to the police, ultimately concerned about my wife's physical safety who then confiscated the coat, the cash, and the wallet. He then came directly to our house from the police (for the second time, he tried our house before we arrived back home and before he went to the police), and after being extremely relieved that she wasn't dead in a ditch or something, informed us of both the coat's location (with the police, and the specific station and officer he talked with) and the contents he had discovered including the cash that my wife had not stored in her wallet but instead an inner pocket. When we went to the police they informed us that both the intake form for the property detailing what had been dropped off had gone missing, and that no cash was present nor had been turned in.
I believe that the goal is to put pressure on those countries and make investors afraid of placing money there. Of course that a single ranking can't make this, but having multiple indexes + media narrative in this sense can create great leverage for unfair trade deals.
If for example you consider lobbying=corruption (in many countries it is), then the US should indeed be many rankings below.
Looking at the WJP Rule of Law Index linked above, it's considering factors like constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, and fundamental rights.
As someone involved in law in the US, the US is really good at these types of things. People, including Americans who have lived here their entire lives, are consistently amazed when they learn the power of the court and how functional it all has managed to be.
It seems like you're equating "there is corruption in the US" with "the US has more corruption than most other countries".
I share your concern for corruption in the US, but I submit that you have lost your sense of proportion. The US is not -- by any stretch of the imagination -- anything less than "mostly not corrupt".
Not to mention the fact that for any poor, poorly-ranked nation, it's likely that USA actions there include dropping bombs, assassinating socialist-leaning democratically-elected leadership, stationing troops and/or spooks, encouraging theft of natural resources, funding criminal terrorist anti-state groups, etc.
That's because, as a consequence of our own transparency, on every thread on a political topic, the resident anarchist trolls are free to give us a history lesson of everything wrong the US has ever done. There are many countries where such types of posters would get arrested on some real or made-up charge for being hyper critical of the state. Most Americans who feel that we're some hyper-corrupt, irreparable place(systemically dysfunctional, if you will) have no idea how far other governments go to cover up their dirty deeds. Our rule of law is still the envy of people who come from places that rule by law.
>World Justice Project ranks it 125 of 128 surveyed countries
Man considering the scale here that's horrific.
But I guess that would explain a process here where they seem to punish someone... 'just because', and with no value coming from the process at all.
It's just injustice for no reason at all.... I can understand corruption to some extent. They get something, but punish this guy for no value, I don't get it.
I can think of two incentives for punishing this guy for no value: First, it will appear that they have “done something about it”, say, to their superiors. Second, some people also feel good if they can put someone down or enforce a loss on someone; It’s a stunted heuristic for them “winning”.
So there is very clear value in it. If the harm is disregarded.
Of course, many third world nations have little regard for their multitude of poor citizens. But I think it's important to high light the way that in situations like this, these nations are forced to accept that the "laws of the sea" trump their own laws and then wind-up unable/unwilling to intervene when a ship, a load of goods or a person winds-up in international legal limbo - the true, horrific poster-child for this was the disastrous Beirut explosion. Enough explosives to level half the city sat in legal limbo for years ... until they did that, yeah. And as we see here, there are many terrible but more mundane examples.
According to the International Labour Organization, there are more than 250 active cases around the world where crews are simply left to fend for themselves. It says 85 new cases were reported in 2020, which is twice as many as in the previous year.
Now that's a sad piece of information I read today.
I'm not clear what Egypt's goal was by forcing this man to stay aboard the ship. Simply declaring him the guardian never made it so. He was never going to be able to resolve the issues himself and it appears the owners have simply abandoned it and written it off. If Egypt can't get money from the owners, then, as owners of the canal, deny other of their ships passage through it.
It's real hard to tell as a non-Egyptian trying to Google enough case law to understand it, but the best I can figure is that the precedent is based upon the assumption that the ship's owner has interest in how the ship fares while the ship is arrested. Ostensibly, the requirement of custodianship should be protecting the interests of the owner... But since the owner could sue Egypt if their ship is damaged while it is kept in the country's care, Egypt mandates someone the owner designates stand watch.
... but, of course, that whole arrangement is predicated on the assumption the owner cares, at all, about the fate of the ship or its crew. Which is, perhaps, a philosophical throwback to a time when ships were the entire livelihood of a town and not assets that multinational corporations own hundreds of.
I don't understand what use he was on that ship? And can't they find any out of work person from shore to take his place? I'm sure there are dozens lining up to get that job for a few pennies an hour. And they might just have family in the area that can help sustain them.
The article says he wasn't paid, at least part of the time. But what I'm saying is that this whole practice makes no sense. There must be people on shore who would be willing to be custodians of abandoned ships.
That's a business idea, start an office offering ship custodians for shipping companies. When they get in trouble they can hire your custodian instead of stranding one of their own employees far from home.
This business wouldn't work out, because you expect to be paid. Stranded employees get stranded because they are seen as expendables, ones that don't need to be paid.
Yeah sure it wouldn't work without a global change in policy too. Because right now shipping companies are just leaving their ships because of hardships, so to think they'd hire someone is silly.
But with policy changes one can imagine a future where sailors prefer employers who have a contract with ship custodians before signing up with them, thereby voting with their employment.
The original problem wasn't lack of fuel, it was inspection issues. They only ran out of fuel after being trapped and running the generators for electricity. In fact the ship probably still has a usable supply of bunker fuel on board so it wouldn't be that hard to get it to port, except that it is still trapped in the original legal limbo.
After 4 years of deferred maintenance the engines are going to need some TLC before they can be fired up again. The longer the ship sits idle the worse the situation becomes. Left long enough and some fitting somewhere will corrode through or be damaged in a storm and without power to run the pumps the ship will start slowly sinking.
> "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
I’ll do it for $10M/year, paid in advance of course due to the company’s financial situation. Oh, he probably means for whatever meager wages they were paying this guy. Yeah, no wonder.
The saddest part of this unfair ordeal is that his mother died while he was confined to this ship, and he couldn’t go visit her or attend the funeral. This article notes, he contemplated suicide then.
Shipping companies regularly do this to their crew, abandoning them when the costs of properly managing the situation aren’t worth it to them. Note that ship abandonment is also what led to the devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus
If you are at the point where your family is dying, and you are contemplating suicide, the only rational choice is burn down the ship to smithereens and leave it at the bottomn of the ocean. Or rip it to bit and sell the parts.
Not to compare bad vs worse, but when I get bored for ten minutes I tend to remember that at least I'm not in Otokichi's crew:
> The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo.
You don't even need to go back that far. Just look at the story of Jose Alvarenga from a few years ago. He was adrift in the Pacific in a tiny fishing boat for the same amount of time:
No, they wouldn’t; heck, his case has gotten attention recently because the crew of the Ever Given has become similarly trapped, and his case has been held up as an example of what might happen to that crew if the dispute between the SCA, and the owners and operators of the Ever Given continues.
> The Aman's owners, Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, told the BBC they had tried to help Mohammed but that their hands were tied.
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
Well, obviously nobody would volunteer unless things were going to change.
But surely the ships operating company had violated their operating agreement, giving the owner grounds to "evict" them, find a new operator, get the updated safety equipment and classification certificates, and pay for the fuel. Once that was done surely the ship would be unseized, and with a new crew installed, Egypt ought to be happy to cancel the guardianship.
This was all especially true back before it ran aground.
It would also seem like this all would be very much in the owner's interest as letting the ship decay cannot be good for the ships value, and they probably were not getting paid rent by the current operator for this.
But I'm guessing there is a lot more to this that the BBC article has left out.
Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019, so Mohammad was not alone for 2 years but only for 7 months (which is no less unacceptable). The only reason Mohammad was allowed to leave was thanks to a local union representative who agreed to take his place as the ship’s guardian.
Speaking of the shopping, it actually makes me curious how he has funded buying the food/essentials he needs to survive. I wish that was covered in the story. 4 years is quite a long time, I am not sure how he would be affording it all. Makes me wonder if some kind of charity was helping him out or some local residences maybe. That also makes me wonder if he stayed on the ship all the time or if he also spent some nights with locals.
The article says he swam ashore to buy supplies. Why can’t he simply walk away and not return to the ship. The article does not clarify that point. Anyone knows?
Because they took his passport away and because he said in a YT video a while back that he still wants to work at sea if/when this is over which would be impossible if he is a “fugitive”
The BBC article makes it feel like he was alone for 4 years and somehow was able to stay alive with no food/water for 3 of them before the ship drifted closer to shore where he could now 'buy food and water'.
The circle is centered around Green Island. Several more circles can be seen further south near Ras Abu Rudeis. It seems that water only seems to be displayed near land and is replaced with simulated blue otherwise.
I hope he is able to profit from his story with book and/or movie rights. It's a fascinating story and I bet would make a great movie a la Captain Phillips or 127 Hours.
The movie Life of Pi also comes to mind in regards to being stuck on a boat and retelling the story but Mohammed’s experience would make a great survival movie no doubt. Maybe Netflix will make a deal with him
A bit of hacking, some solar panels, a few stereos, tents, some poker chips, a rock band's visit... how long before the authorities would force him off? How many bitcoins would have he raked?
(OK this is thinking different in a slightly hollywoodesque way... still)
Is there something that could be done by people otherwise uninvolved - like myself, or my fellow HN readers - to help the other ~250 people who are currently stuck in similar situations?
I don’t even know how to go about enumerating who those people are, their ships, or where they are anchored. With that information a well-organized and/or funded group could at least get someone out to these people to check on them, provide basic supplies, and perhaps some form of reliable communications.
A lot of problems seem insurmountable large and complex, and even this one seems so if your goal is to free these people of their legal liabilities - but if you set aside trying to solve the reason they’re stuck onboard these ships in the first place, providing basic humanitarian aid to them seems doable.
In this particular instance, that seems to be the case. I imagine there are probably legal hurdles that needed to be overcome to even make that happen, but I’m glad it did.
I just sent an email to the International Maritime Organization, who manages the database I linked in the GP, to ask if there are any extant organizations dedicated to providing relief to people in similar situations. I’ll update here when and if I hear back from them, or as I make progress toward figuring out the scope of this issue in other ways.
I wonder if there is any value in supervising the boat if it has no power... No power means no engines, no lights and no radios. That means even if the boat was robbed, there is nothing the supervisor could do about it.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I don’t have the ability to easily influence that. I might have the ability to make people’s lives easier in similar situations.
In particular, here’s a recent update that sheds some light on why Mr. Aisha remained aboard - in short, he refused to leave unless and until he was paid the wages due to him:
Govt. of Bahrain (7 March 2021)
From Registration of Ships & Seamen Affairs
I would like to highlight few facts as below:
1) Vessel is not abandoned, but under court arrest due to ongoing cases.
2) Seafarer by the name Mohamed Aisha had accepted a court appointment to act as court representative onboard. As such, when the owner repatriated all other crew members he was not allowed to be repatriated by the courts.
3) We had intervened with owner several time and also arranged for the courts to allow his repatriation by appointing another representative, but he decided not to disembark due to outstanding wages.
4) The owners have tried with all resources available to repatriate him but he was not willing to cooperate.
If he is now ready to be repatriated, then the owners are willing to cover such costs of air passage and local charges as a show of our commitment towards him.
This seems like pretty important information if correct. A huge portion of the HN discussion is moot if the Mr. Aisha chose to remain. Seems like he could have continued his fight for the outstanding wages elsewhere.
If I understood that correctly, "chose to remain" because if he didn't, he would lose his claim for wages for the time he was stuck on the ship. That's a fair amount of money.
Sure if that is the case, it is not a good trade-off. But that is a much different situation than the one that was communicated by the reporting, which suggested he had no legal way to leave.
I'm still not sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.
They can, but will they? It is really tricky to handle this type of thing without declaring war. It's is also tricky for the other country to do this without getting war declared on them.
I totally disagree. Based on sibling comments it seems like some people think this would have legally screwed up his claim to the lost wages, and even if not, giving up your only leverage in this situation is probably not the optimal strategy.
I can see a parallel world where he decided to get off the boat and we're reading an article about how he lost all that time and won't be able to recover wages, and some HN commenter goes "oh well he should have just stayed on the boat, he got off willingly, so all this discussion is moot".
The reality is this guy was put into a nightmare situation by a combination of his company not appearing to have planned properly (or cared enough about this outcome to prepare for it) and Egypt's ridiculous law where someone can be legally responsible for a ship they have no ownership of. Expecting him to correctly navigate international laws to determine what the action is for him to get off the ship but get paid for the time as he deserves seems somewhat ridiculous. In reality, this situation should never have happened in the first place and I place the vast majority of the blame for that on the company and Egypt.
My point was that "I have no legal way to leave" is a different scenario than "I won't leave until I get paid".
Both situations have a tremendous unfairness about them but they aren't the same and I don't think it is unreasonable to think that those details are an important part of the story.
Depending on thtle situation, there is little to no difference between "I have no legal way to leave" and "I have no legal way to leave and be paid for my work".
The vast majority of the world's population is not in a financial situation where they can just write off months of work for no pay, so they might as well have been legally trapped there.
I suspect there is more to the story, but if the GP entry is to be believed how is wasting away by yourself in a tin can trying to recoup wages from an insolvent company for 2 years a more "optimal strategy" than going home to your family and getting on another boat?
Extricate yourself from the system, do not vindicate yourself from within it.
It definitely sounds like he got at the very least a shitty deal. If you don't have time to watch, he mentions he feels he signed something he didn't fully understand, leaving him liable as guardian, passport seized and all.
425 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadAnd if you work in international shipping it’s not very good for your career to be blacklisted from Egypt.
[1] https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/chief-mate-strand...
How is this not inhumane and cruel? I can understand confiscating someone's passport if that person is a criminal, but this? This is like Saudi Arabia taking the passports of its laborers.
It is insane that things like this happen, in 2021
I mean, if you're an American citizen heading home and you lose your passport on the walkway to board your plane in France... it's not like America's going to prevent you from entering, right?
Surely it's gonna take some time to verify who you are and fix the situation. But it's not like you're forever banned from your own country.
Leaving Egypt might have been too difficult logistically to pull off, but once he had I don't see any legal difficulty returning home.
Even so, US authorities do not just take "sorry fellow USicans, I lost my passport" at face value and will likely detain you until you are able to prove you are a citizen, and put you through quite a bit of extra screening and interrogation. Realistically it would be less of an issue for a white person with a bland American accent, since Border Patrol would probably let you call a lawyer or family member to bring a birth certificate. But I am quite sure an El Salvadoran-American who forgot his passport would not be able to enter the US from Mexico without incredible legal difficulty - again to the point where it would be faster and considerably less traumatizing to just go to a consulate and wait a few weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM
I found the article to be really poor actually. It seems a lot of details were left out, possibly for maximum effect at editorializing the situation.
If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable.
Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.
It's not about not wanting to offend wealthy people. It's in part a matter of "Who has authority here?"
There's a lot I don't understand about it, but this seems like it's probably a fairly modern development and it's high time we created meaningful solutions so this cannot happen again.
Glad to see he got free and a reporter was talking to him and he was broadcasting via internet. But that should not be how something like this gets resolved, on some kind of ad hoc basis after so long.
And someone here said someone volunteered to take his place, so it's apparently not really resolved, though he got relief.
Your point still remains valid though.
The mess of US civil forfeiture laws originally showed up in maritime law such that the owners and outstanding loans became irrelevant. In effect the physical object is what’s confiscated breaking any ties to anyone that had a prior ownership stake.
If he had title, then he could sell it. The lienholder, however, would have a claim on the proceeds of the sale.
Isn't there a law at sea where if you find an abandoned ship, it is basically yours? Perhaps this law doesn't apply in Egyptian national waters?
If he is the legal guardian of the ship, why wouldn't he be able to just sell it for profit and move on? Was it just that there would be no buyer for it, even to scrap it? Or could there have been fines/liens on that ship such that no one would want to buy it? If that is the case it seems odd that he couldn't himself abandon the ship to the lien holders.
(it would still be slavery, however, you have a right to quit your job).
Salvagers work on contract with the owners in most cases. When they don't there are generally big lawsuits because they are entitled for compensation for their work, but if they don't give anything brought up back the the owners they are in possession of stolen property, and the law around this is complex.
If the vessel is more than 1000 years old we probably can't trace an onwer anymore and you can get by with calling it abandoned in some cases. Though even here the country who's waters it is in might consider the wreck a treasure.
He is the guard, not the owner. As such he can't sell it. The owners are probably in complex bankruptcy court and the lien holders will eventually get to figure out what to do with it, but that will take years to resolve. Indeed the expense of resolving this might be more than the ship is worth so nobody actually wants to resolve it.
I'm no lawyer (so don't try this at home), and I bet you'd need to find a good lawyer to get a with a trick like that :)
But as a creditor in possession of property owned by the debitor, selling said property to recuperate losses doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Certainly, not if debitor does not take action recover possession of the property, etc.
Even if he got into trouble after selling the ship, I would hope a jury would side the person being held for "ransom by said property".
But yes, between Egyptian and Syrian courts, I suppose there is a serious risk you'll get squashed either way. Because we can't have sailors selling their ships :)
It said 250, not thousands.
I bet there would be significant profit in it, at least from the perspective of a handful of individuals, and especially if things could be arranged to make the sailor judgment proof--e.g. have his share of any proceeds go to family members--so free loaders (i.e. lazy ship owners, clients, and insurers) couldn't swoop in at the end to claim any proceeds. But it's not just a matter of profit; it's a matter of opportunity costs. All the parties most capable of pulling this off clearly felt there was more profit to be had by walking away and pursuing other opportunities.
Surely people on HN understand this phenomenon: there are an infinite number of profitable opportunities out there, but some are better than others, and there's only a finite amount of time and capital.
Even if he could manage the ship, a random crew member is highly unlikely to have resources to care for a ship like that... what value is there in assigning him this responsibility? They just punishing someone for the sake of it?
Somebody needs to do it and the crew members are the simplest people to task it to.
The ship had no fuel, it went adrift and ran aground...
Say what?
It would be interesting if this did happen and the court found him guilty of dereliction of duty for not conjuring replacement parts out of thin air. Would he be sent to a land prison or back to the prison of the ship?
100% blame on Egypt here for a stupid rule ignoring consequences.
The article doesn't state it really explicitly but I believe he was able to decline but maybe not aware of when that decision would need to be made - specifically this passage here:
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative [of the shipping company] told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
> Mohammed, they said, should never have signed the order in the first place.
It sounds like he signed a thing without fully understanding the ramifications of it - some eygptian official might have pulled a sneaky to trick him into signing it without full knowledge of the consequences or he may have simply acted unwisely but, either way, I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him (for instance, one of the actual owners could've stepped up and owned their error), or provided clear guidance and legal advice to the crew members.
The fact that the captain GTFO'd before any of this really started to go down really reinforces that this guy was left holding the short end of the stick and the company itself is pretty insanely slimy for not, at least, attempting to continue to support him.
Swimming to shore to get fresh water is a seriously messed up scenario.
Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation. The problem is almost entirely with the Egyptian authorities. Such a situation shouldn't even be possible to develop. The first mate in the article might not have understood the ramifications of what he signed, but the Egyptian court certainly did.
There are all kinds of reasons for why a shipping company would be unable to help. That doesn't mean it should leave a person in a legal limbo. That's on the country rather than the company.
I'm surprised the guy didn't just leave. A country whose laws don't respect you doesn't deserve respect in return.
The CEO was the right person to to replace him immediately until they could make it a sufficiently attractive proposition that someone else would want to do it. You know by the usual means. Pay, supply drops, fuel for power etc.
The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form. It's so bad I would have no issue with the company being blacklisted as a criminal organisation.
And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared? Then what? There could be any number of reasons why a company might be unable to do what they need to do. The guy is still stuck there then, because it all rests on the shipping company rather than the country whose government is holding him there.
So in insolvency that is deemed bankruptcy the assets of the company are traditionally used to deal with as much of the liabilities of the company as they can in rank order of those liabilities. You know secured debt ranks ahead of unsecured etc.
This guy's claim on the assets of the company to get him out of that hell, for me, rank number 1, and alone. Next comes the wages due all employees not deprived of their liberty. And that's the usual way it is done too.
Then if a company has behaved abysmally by choosing to dump their employee in hell then the law needs to be involved on those making that decision. Absolutely. There needs to be consequences for making that /choice/. As was clearly made in this instance assuming the accuracy of the report.
If the company did well instead of go bankrupt who is cashing the biggest check? That is who is responsible. Work your way down that list until you find someone, everyone you can't find is a fugitive and has their assets seized.
This situation was created by the country essentially leaving a 4k tonne vessel derelict off the coast of Eygpt after failing to pay to fuel its ride home so there isn't going to be an easy answer here. It might be that the company had some act-of-god like circumstance happen (like an employee fraudulently embezzling funds and tampering with a fuel gauge to make it look like the ship had far more fuel than it did though... that's insanely unlikely given how shifty everyone is acting).
Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation (which would likely be a large asset loss for the company).
I really don't think Egypt is likely the worst actor in this situation but it was cruel what they put this man through. Ideally the administrator trying to untangle this POS would realize this employee has essentially no power to resolve the situation and release them home - but his options to escape were likely pretty few.
If you're a passing ship the last thing you want to do is piss off Egypt since the country is pretty corrupt and controls the Suez Canal (which you plan on sailing through if your ship is anywhere in the neighborhood) - getting on their bad side is likely a one-way ticket to random inspections and tariffs or an outright ban and the only land close enough for the man to flee to was Egypt itself - so he'd need to sneakily emigrate... he's heading back to Syria so that means he'd need to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border under the radar and potentially without a passport - and probably with very little cash.
I really feel for this dude when he says he was struggling with depression because his situation was utterly screwed - the universe really wasn't on his side.... buuuut, I think the company owning the ship comes out the worst. The article doesn't have the details but something seriously slimy was going on there.
Removing a ship could cause an international incident, but forcing a person to stay alone on a ship without proper living conditions for years wouldn't? Imagine if the guy wasn't Syrian, but was an American instead. This would've either been resolved quickly or there would've been an international incident that would've put the removal of a ship to shame.
There's also a good chance they could've declared the ship lost at sea and either scuttled it or offered it for a dollar (or other token currency amount) to salvage companies.
Either way it sounds like the Captain probably knew what was going on. When the Captain learned that the parent company had ran out of money, he probably was aware of these cases of seafarer abandonment and decided he didn't want to be one of them. So he left the ship, leaving the responsibility on Mohammed.
Mohammed claimed he didn't really know the meaning of this responsibility until everyone else started disembarking. It sounds like by then the captain had been gone, for at least 4 months, and potentially longer.
The Captain sacrificed Mohammed here. Either way, someone was going to be abandoned on that vessel. I think the Captain saw the writing on the wall and abandoned quickly, shifting responsibility onto someone else.
There are lots of people at fault here. Egyptian authorities, Tyson Shipping and Marine Company (which seems to have continued operating despite all this), and the Captain. Unfortunately Mohammed is one of the innocent ones caught in the middle. He shouldn't have signed the paper as the shipping company is quick to point out. But that doesn't resolve the real issue. It would have just meant the Captain or someone else would have been forced into this situation.
That all said - that's a hard battle and one you're probably not going to win unless you a) don't be speak english or b) don't have full control of your mental faculties - "I couldn't be arsed to read the contract" is generally not a defense unless the contract goes out of its way to be intentionally misleading.
This doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves the problem around to the free market. What if no one wanted to buy it for scrap? Would he be responsible for cleaning up the situation himself? The court should have impounded the ship using Egypt's own coast guard and billed the company for the coast guard's time.
Maybe the guy could have made some calls down to Somalia and convinced some pirates that a big prize was ripe for the taking if they were willing to take a road trip?
Edit: a more useful video linked below explains that the authorities confiscated his passport. That would make it difficult to leave. Though I'd probably try anyway after a year of that.
ETA: I've read a few of these articles over the last year. There have been many similar cases because of covid. It seems to be completely normal practice for countries to refuse visas to ships' crew.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM
"It's enough, you might imagine, to make him think twice about going back to sea.
But he is determined. He says he is good at his job and wants nothing more than to pick up where he left off."
EDIT: Apparently his passport may have been confiscated.
It is a sad state of affairs, whichever way you look at it.
There's something odd about this story because neither a passport nor money should have kept him there, unless there was literally some kind of watch for him, and/or the cash situation was really that extremely dire. That said, he was able to survive for 4 years so money had to be coming from somewhere.
I suggest that he was maybe being paid a tiny amount, and that he felt it'd be better to 'stick it out' as a nearly worthless cog, than to take a risky path home to what might be nothing anyhow.
Meanwhile HN commenters be moaning every time their scrollbar is hijacked by a link or they have to deal with spaghetti code at work like "I'm so burned out"
Similarly (and tragically) the Syrian government is not known for its compassion towards its distressed citizens.
[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/Eg...
The US gets a green square and a high rank, smaller countries are corrupt and unfair. I could fill up paragraphs about how corrupt and dysfunctional our (US) legal and political systems are. Meanwhile I spent a long time in Central Africa (a red square country) and know to compare.
I don’t get the purpose of these rankings.
I’m from Africa, have left now, and this is pure nonsense.
The USA doesn’t have to be literally perfect for it to be a good place.
It’s vastly better to a degree that left me totally mindfucked for years after I moved to the first world.
I trust your observations of where you came from but I believe this is over-generalizing to places you may not have personal experience with.
Property rights are an especially important tool when it comes to the operation of a materially wealthy society. But their imposition does not somehow guarantee that a society is more just or fair and less corrupt than any other.
Edit: I looked up the figures in my notes. The paper involved all Supreme Court cases involving the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The court struck down 232 state laws, 179 of the decisions were in favor of corporations, 55 were in favor of the growing railroads and 9 were in favor of individual black petitioners.
The paper isn't online and I don't have access to it anymore to check but I believe it is this paper.
"Protecting Corporations Instead of the Poor" by Alec Karakatsanis in Harvard Law Review 275.
By contrast, especially in Central Africa, the borders on the map are largely aspirational on the part of the governments. Even the word “Democratic” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a bad joke. The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
I would argue this is a false statement. There are pockets of instability there, especially near Goma and Virunga or very rural areas. The last few years especially have been unstable. But if you look at the country as a whole (which is the size of all Western Europe) over the last 15 years, the size of the territory not controlled by the internationally recognized legitimate government has been very small.
But a better test is this: would you go for a drive there with your family? Would you invest billions in a multi-decade mining project there - if you had to depend on the government’s version of law & order only?
1) It varies far too much from country to country to generalize in this way.
2) Justice is patchy and even across many areas of law depending on where you are.
Other aspects are much worse.
Also, most legal systems are generally good for this purpose, you just have to use your money judiciously in bribes instead of lawyer's fees.
I have not seen the lack of low level corruption in the states compared to other countries. Like in other countries they simply confine their corruption to those powerless to do anything about it.
Also, I’m low-key wondering if I should start handing the cop my wallet. They never give me a warning, maybe if they got some money out of the interaction they’d start...
Not judging, just curious.
If for example you consider lobbying=corruption (in many countries it is), then the US should indeed be many rankings below.
As someone involved in law in the US, the US is really good at these types of things. People, including Americans who have lived here their entire lives, are consistently amazed when they learn the power of the court and how functional it all has managed to be.
I share your concern for corruption in the US, but I submit that you have lost your sense of proportion. The US is not -- by any stretch of the imagination -- anything less than "mostly not corrupt".
US has been given a surprisingly high score while France and Italy are way below China!
There seems to be quite a lot of bias in this kind of scoring.
Man considering the scale here that's horrific.
But I guess that would explain a process here where they seem to punish someone... 'just because', and with no value coming from the process at all.
It's just injustice for no reason at all.... I can understand corruption to some extent. They get something, but punish this guy for no value, I don't get it.
So there is very clear value in it. If the harm is disregarded.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It seems that the lack of compassion that Egypt has for its neighbors will be repaid in kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
Now that's a sad piece of information I read today.
... but, of course, that whole arrangement is predicated on the assumption the owner cares, at all, about the fate of the ship or its crew. Which is, perhaps, a philosophical throwback to a time when ships were the entire livelihood of a town and not assets that multinational corporations own hundreds of.
That's a business idea, start an office offering ship custodians for shipping companies. When they get in trouble they can hire your custodian instead of stranding one of their own employees far from home.
But with policy changes one can imagine a future where sailors prefer employers who have a contract with ship custodians before signing up with them, thereby voting with their employment.
After 4 years of deferred maintenance the engines are going to need some TLC before they can be fired up again. The longer the ship sits idle the worse the situation becomes. Left long enough and some fitting somewhere will corrode through or be damaged in a storm and without power to run the pumps the ship will start slowly sinking.
I’ll do it for $10M/year, paid in advance of course due to the company’s financial situation. Oh, he probably means for whatever meager wages they were paying this guy. Yeah, no wonder.
Shipping companies regularly do this to their crew, abandoning them when the costs of properly managing the situation aren’t worth it to them. Note that ship abandonment is also what led to the devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus
> The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi (from a recent-ish HN thread).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/fisherman-lost...
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
Well, obviously nobody would volunteer unless things were going to change.
But surely the ships operating company had violated their operating agreement, giving the owner grounds to "evict" them, find a new operator, get the updated safety equipment and classification certificates, and pay for the fuel. Once that was done surely the ship would be unseized, and with a new crew installed, Egypt ought to be happy to cancel the guardianship.
This was all especially true back before it ran aground.
It would also seem like this all would be very much in the owner's interest as letting the ship decay cannot be good for the ships value, and they probably were not getting paid rent by the current operator for this.
But I'm guessing there is a lot more to this that the BBC article has left out.
Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019, so Mohammad was not alone for 2 years but only for 7 months (which is no less unacceptable). The only reason Mohammad was allowed to leave was thanks to a local union representative who agreed to take his place as the ship’s guardian.
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.9322048,32.5328029,607m/data...
Or is this just some weird imaging artifact?
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8726136,32.521419,622m/data=...
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8785189,32.5055481,472m/data...
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8477291,32.5178057,452m/data...
I wouldn’t try my luck in a foreign restricted military zone.
The BBC article makes it feel like he was alone for 4 years and somehow was able to stay alive with no food/water for 3 of them before the ship drifted closer to shore where he could now 'buy food and water'.
what is this circle, anyways: https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D...
A bit of hacking, some solar panels, a few stereos, tents, some poker chips, a rock band's visit... how long before the authorities would force him off? How many bitcoins would have he raked? (OK this is thinking different in a slightly hollywoodesque way... still)
cheers!
I don’t even know how to go about enumerating who those people are, their ships, or where they are anchored. With that information a well-organized and/or funded group could at least get someone out to these people to check on them, provide basic supplies, and perhaps some form of reliable communications.
A lot of problems seem insurmountable large and complex, and even this one seems so if your goal is to free these people of their legal liabilities - but if you set aside trying to solve the reason they’re stuck onboard these ships in the first place, providing basic humanitarian aid to them seems doable.
ETA: This looks like a good place to start - https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.home
So maybe people could volunteer to replace them on a rolling schedule.
I just sent an email to the International Maritime Organization, who manages the database I linked in the GP, to ask if there are any extant organizations dedicated to providing relief to people in similar situations. I’ll update here when and if I hear back from them, or as I make progress toward figuring out the scope of this issue in other ways.
(I don't want to get injured by a ship in disrepair)
So what if the guy in question doesn't show up?
In particular, here’s a recent update that sheds some light on why Mr. Aisha remained aboard - in short, he refused to leave unless and until he was paid the wages due to him:
I'm still not sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.
I can see a parallel world where he decided to get off the boat and we're reading an article about how he lost all that time and won't be able to recover wages, and some HN commenter goes "oh well he should have just stayed on the boat, he got off willingly, so all this discussion is moot".
The reality is this guy was put into a nightmare situation by a combination of his company not appearing to have planned properly (or cared enough about this outcome to prepare for it) and Egypt's ridiculous law where someone can be legally responsible for a ship they have no ownership of. Expecting him to correctly navigate international laws to determine what the action is for him to get off the ship but get paid for the time as he deserves seems somewhat ridiculous. In reality, this situation should never have happened in the first place and I place the vast majority of the blame for that on the company and Egypt.
Both situations have a tremendous unfairness about them but they aren't the same and I don't think it is unreasonable to think that those details are an important part of the story.
The vast majority of the world's population is not in a financial situation where they can just write off months of work for no pay, so they might as well have been legally trapped there.
I suspect there is more to the story, but if the GP entry is to be believed how is wasting away by yourself in a tin can trying to recoup wages from an insolvent company for 2 years a more "optimal strategy" than going home to your family and getting on another boat?
Extricate yourself from the system, do not vindicate yourself from within it.
It definitely sounds like he got at the very least a shitty deal. If you don't have time to watch, he mentions he feels he signed something he didn't fully understand, leaving him liable as guardian, passport seized and all.