News • Created June 25, 2025 04:42

Legal Frameworks and Policy Reform for Maritime Crime

Abstract Maritime crime in Africa’s waters, and especially the Gulf of Guinea, has snowballed into one of the pressing security and governance challenges of the 21st century. Piracy, trafficking, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing pose economic, state authority, and regional integration challenges. In turn, states and regions have synergized to push forward a wave […]

Legal Frameworks and Policy Reform for Maritime Crime

Abstract

Maritime crime in Africa’s waters, and especially the Gulf of Guinea, has snowballed into one of the pressing security and governance challenges of the 21st century. Piracy, trafficking, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing pose economic, state authority, and regional integration challenges. In turn, states and regions have synergized to push forward a wave of legal and policy responses, including various forms of harmonized anti-piracy law and cooperative prosecutive policies. This paper reviews the development of these regimes, the problems with building legislative capacity, and looks forward to possibilities for greater border enforcement. It contends that only through continued harmonization and innovative policies can the future of Africa at sea be secure and reform linked to economic development and ocean governance.

 Keywords

Maritime Crime, Gulf of Guinea, Piracy, Trafficking, IUU Fishing, Legal Reform, Policy Harmonization, Cross-Border Prosecution

 Introduction

Africa’s maritime space represents an economic opportunity and also a space of vulnerability. Given that the Gulf of Guinea accounts for as much as a quarter of the continent’s overall trade, it has long been reported as a piracy and transnational maritime crime hotspot globally (International Maritime Bureau 2021). These exist alongside human trafficking and smuggling, drugs and arms trafficking networks, and the illicit fishing, which not only threaten food security but also destroy local livelihoods and take billions of dollars out of African economies every year (FAO, 2022).

These dynamics expose not only a lack of security but a deficiency of legal and institutional responses. For decades, most African coastal states also lacked the legal framework to effectively criminalize the acts of maritime crime, resulting in their waters being under-policed and courts not having the capacity to prosecute complex transnational cases. The lack of unified enforcement patterns benefited criminals, who used jurisdictional gaps as a matter of course.

In recent years, however, momentum for reform has increased. Also, international actors have worked together with organizations such as the African Union, the ECOWAS, and the ECCAS towards a harmonization of laws and coordinated law enforcement. It indicates a change in understanding of global maritime security, not as simply naval or coast guard patrols, but as a concept that is integrated within good governance, institutions, and constant legislative development. 

Evolving Legal Frameworks for Maritime Crime

The influence of international conventions and regional agreements on the eventual shaping of African laws on piracy and other crimes at sea is apparent. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, lays down the basic framework for this, defining piracy as well as providing a basis for states to exercise jurisdiction on the high seas. But UNCLOS, by itself, has not been sufficient to tackle local realities in African waters, which continue to suffer from the rampant oil theft, trafficking, and IUU fishing as well (Kraska, 2019).

National legislation would also, in time, become an important complement. A landmark development was Nigeria’s Suppression of Piracy and Other Maritime Offences Act in 2019, the first comprehensive anti-piracy law in West Africa. Amongst others, it facilitated the prosecution of pirates in local courts, and it was a form of commitment to nationalizing international law (Adefolake, 2020). Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and other countries have also started to reform their laws, although uneven institutional capacity has limited their application.

Regionally, the 2013 Yaoundé Code of Conduct has played an important role. The accord unified 25 countries in West and Central Africa, creating institutional frameworks for collaboration in both operations and information sharing. The creation of the Interregional Coordination Centre in Yaoundé was meant to promote cooperation, but again, the non-binding code, as well as ongoing resource constraints, have made this less effective . These experiences highlight the need to have commitments made at the regional level to be reflected in legally binding national systems with adequate institutional capacity to back them up.

Policy Reform and Institutional Capacity-Building

Legislative reform is only as good as the institutions that are supposed to enforce such measures. Perhaps the foremost challenge for African states is the poor capacity to deal with maritime crime within the courts and prosecutions. Maritime crime is distinct from typical crime in that there are frequently multiple jurisdictions involved, complicated international laws to interpret, or technical evidence such as vessel tracking information .

Capacity building efforts have included mostly training judicial officials, prosecutors, and maritime law enforcement agencies. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in particular, has been active in supporting states such as Nigeria and Togo with specialized units for sea crime. These efforts have limited the use of foreign courts in Europe or North America and opened up prosecution within African states, as well as enhancing the sovereignty of African legal systems.

Overlapping mandates of agencies and a lack of coordination have also been another hindering factor. Coast guards, customs officials, fisheries inspectors, and national police also play roles in maritime security, which is not exclusively a naval domain. Without frameworks’ overlaps, enforcement is compromised by redundancy and jurisdictional conflicts. Policy reforms that formalize the use of inter-agency task forces and create clearer prescriptions of agency boundaries are effective and helpful in achieving cohesion as well as preventing criminals from taking advantage of bureaucratic loopholes (Onuoha, 2020).

Cross-Border Prosecution and Regional Harmonization

Cross-border prosecution has been integral to good governance, as maritime crime seldom occurs within borders. But, in practice, jurisdictional issues and differing definitions of the law by state have made this difficult. For example, let’s consider a ship intercepted in Ghanaian fishery waters, with a Nigerian crew navigating to Europe with contraband cargo. This poses the question of who has the legal right and duty to prosecute such an individual, and lacking consistent legal codes these types of cases often dissolve into diplomatic ambiguity.

One possible way forward is regional harmonization. This is recognized in, among others, the AU’s 2050 Africa Integrated Maritime Strategy, as well as the 2016 Lomé Charter on Maritime Security. This is supplemented by things such as Nigeria-Benin bilateral agreements on joint patrols and cooperative prosecutions in the Gulf of Guinea. One instance of how domestic changes in tandem with regional cooperation can close jurisdictional gaps to allow for accountability is the successful prosecution of pirates under the 2019 law in Nigeria following joint navy operations .

Varying degrees of commitment of states and inequality of resources remain a challenge to overcome. Even though some nations have made progress in this, others are still missing either the judicial resources or the political will to reform maritime space. Strengthening these gaps will need strong institutions and investments, but much more so will need a common acknowledgment that Africa’s waters are a shared security issue.

 Challenges and Future Prospects

While progress has been made, significant issues counter to reform persist. Most states have extremely limited resources, whether this means funded coast guards or courts that lack the resources to carry out their mandates. Political corruption and interference further create gaps in these legal instruments, making them less effective and filling in the missing pieces of the legal instruments, leaving room for criminal networks to operate without any fear of prosecution. Similarly, as globalized issues, neither the problem of trafficking nor that of IUU fishing can find solutions exclusively within Africa, and any meaningful solutions will continue to necessitate partnerships with actors beyond Africa, such as the EU, International Maritime Organization, and INTERPOL.

Ultimately, whether there will be an impactful change in the trajectory of maritime crime will depend upon African states’ ability to institutionalize maritime law through regional frameworks like the Yaoundé Architecture, provide enough political and material support for such frameworks, and ensure those laws are operationalized through constant and sustained training of personnel within states to uniformly apply said laws within national jurisdictions . Public-private partnerships are another avenue of hope, especially in the fisheries and shipping industry, where partnerships with industry can greatly enhance monitoring, reporting, and enforcement. Taken more strategically, Africa’s maritime governance can shift even more from the enforcement of reaction to security and development.

 Conclusion

The fight against marine crime in African waters exposes the need for legal and policy reform as a precursor to sustainable governance of the ocean. While international conventions such as UNCLOS provide important tools, enhancements in the Gulf of Guinea and in other areas will depend on states’ capacities to harmonize legislation within states, to build up judicial capacities, and to coordinate across borders.

The ramifications are not only security-related. A good legal framework builds not only investors’ confidence, but also protects livelihoods and vulnerable ecosystems from exploitation. By having African countries more accountable to one another, working together, and reforming what is now the national and regional governance structure, waters could eventually assume a role not as a threat but as spaces for development and integration. These reforms will be evaluated based not only on the decrease of piracy, trafficking, and IUU fishing, but also on the relevance and competitiveness of African maritime economies in an increasingly smaller world.

About the Author

Linda Etta is a Marine/Maritime expert with over a decade of experience in providing policy and technical support to public and private institutions on natural resource management and ocean-based issues.

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