Catching Pirates or Expanding Control? VMS, AIS and Maritime Jurisdiction Wars -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

The global battle against illegal unreported and unregulated fishing.00 is often depicted as a great moral war, law abiding coastal states pitched against rapacious foreign vessels looting the sovereign waters of developing nations. Such a narrative is politically expedient, legally attractive and dangerously misleading. But beneath the surface rhetoric of marine resource protection, a new reality is emerging one where maritime surveillance technologies enforce not just law but jurisdictional power.

As transparency tools, we had the introduction of Vessel Monitoring Systems and Automatic Identification Systems. In theory, they assist authorities in the tracking of vessels, identifying anomalous behaviour and providing a basis for an enforcement action against IUU fishing. In reality though, such technologies are shaping up to become something greater: tools by which states convert our digital footprints into legal power. The question has shifted from whether illegal fishing is caught to by how much. The question is whether the sea becomes a zero-sum jurisdictional battlefield where obligation to monitor at all times turns signals, not ships or boats, into guilt.

That’s important because technology comes to the law not as an indifferent observer. Data is never just data. VMS and AIS signals have very technical systems that are far from fool-proof including when they are generated, interrupted, manipulated around or lost into the sea (called signal fading), spoofed during transmission at any given time where it can suffer inaccuracy once interpreted by receivers. But as states become increasingly dependent on maritime surveillance, the intuitive appeal is clear: consider technological outputs to be objective facts of life and regard contestation thereof as obstruction. When that occurs, the courtroom is likely to turn into a place where evidence made by the state reverberates.

This is where it all becomes legally serious. An easy acceptance of maritime surveillance data itself as a conclusive form of evidence before ITLOS-type (International Tribunal for the Law of Sea) international tribunals, represents an incipient migration from territorial facts to technological narrativization in terms connection with jurisdiction. The ability to condemn a vessel is therefore less about direct proof that can be proved in the physical world by enforcement agents than it is an outcome of having its movements reinforced through digital architecture. That is a dangerous shift. It supplants evidentiary caution with techno-legal certainty.

Naturally, coast states are fully entitled to protect their fisheries. So much so, many suffer tangible and devastating losses due to foreign illegal fishing fleets. For many countries with limited patrol reach, surveillance technologies can serve as an important leveler. Yet, necessity must not lead us to ignore the darker logic that often accompanies enforcement. More commonly, states do not stop at merely deploying technology to identify violations. They use it to extend influence, legitimise assertions of sovereignty over remote areas and rationalize ever more demanding expansions of maritime claim.

Anti IUU enforcement can thus morph into jurisdictional overreach. The lofty language of conservation turns into a funnel to the legal expansion of spying power. The pirate is valuable not only because of his violation of laws, but also as far as he legitimizes and enhances the infrastructures and mechanisms for better tracking, interception nad prosecution. The outcome is a modality of digital ocean governance that renders every ship permanently legible with respect to states, and each communication constantly liable in legal battle.

There should be nothing that alarms anyone who believes international law needs a difference between proof and power. How the sea has always been a battleground between freedom and its negation. VMS and AIS don’t cure that tension; they exacerbate it. They enable states to see more, deduce and desire more. And it is only when those claims are cloaked in the words of law that power expansion begins to resemble justice.

The risk is not going after-unlawful angling. It should be. The threat is that prosecution of it could subtly affirm a precedent in which technological surveillance gains something near-sacred status as evidence by the world community. If that precedent solidifies, less powerful nations, low-tech practitioners and even bona fide foreign ships may be left vulnerable to legal regimes from which rebuttals against machine-generated accusations are virtually impossible.

That is the real question: do VMS and AIS help to catch pirates or not? They do. But what really overlaps with shore on the fishing grounds, even if we only ever notice in passing how much of it looks like you are doing something when a coastal area falls under your maritime enforcement.

To be serious about justice, international courts must resist the pull of tech certainty. Surveillance data needs to inform judicial decisions, rather than doing the heavy lifting for them. Otherwise, it will turn the fight against illegal fishing into something much more serious, a war over who owns the right to see, prosecute and eventually rule that ocean.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia