Suppose I buy myself a nice boat and renounce my American citizenship. I now sail into international waters. What is my status with ships I meet? Can various navies use me for target practice with no consequences? I assume anyone who wanted to commit an act of Piracy against me would not have anything to worry about.
Basically my questions are:
Are you allowed to be a citizen of no state or country at all?
and if so, can others commit crimes against me with no consequences if we are in international waters?
What if I buy the equivalent of a floating island like an oil platform, do the same rules apply as if I am on a ship?
Yes. Stateless people exist. Most of them are stateless involuntarily, however, and would prefer to have a nationality.
No. International waters are not outside any legal system. Usually there is jurisdiction of the flag state, i.e., of the state where the vessel is registered, and that applies irrespective of the nationality (or lack thereor) of the people on board.
A former student of mine was stateless for as long as it took to become a Canadian citizen. He skipped the draft and renounced his US citizenship (just went to the consulate and did it). It made traveling a pain. He had a UN passport and, although I may misremember the details, needed a visa from any country he wished to visit as well as some sort of proof that he could re-enter Canada. This happened in 1969 and the rules have probably gotten a lot more strict in 45 years.
Being stateless doesn’t mean people can commit crimes against you with impunity. It is, for example, a crime to kill another human being regardless of what their citizenship status is.
As for crimes committed in international waters, there’s usually some country that can claim jurisdiction if it wants to make a case. As Schnitte noted, it’ll usually be a country which has the registry of one of the ships that were present at the scene of the crime.
So what happens if an unregistered armed vessel crewed by stateless pirates encounters another boat crewed by stateless people in the open ocean? Can they kill each other with no repercussions?
Incidentally, this would be also true in outer space if these were privately launched spacecraft crewed by people who renounced their citizenship in orbit or went to an asteroid and used the raw materials to build and launch a new ship that the originating nation would not have a claim to.
Referenced journal articles:
“That Sinking Feeling: Stateless Ships, Universal Jurisdiction, and the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act.” Yale J. Int’l L. 37 (2012): 433]
“Marijuana on the High Seas Act and Jurisdiction over Stateless Vessels, The.” Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 25 (1983): 313.
UN Document: Combating transnational organized Crime Committed at sea: [INDENT]Article 101 of UNCLOS defines piracy as consisting of any of the following acts:
“[a]ny illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed
for private ends by the crew or passengers of a private ship […] and directed:
(a) on the high seas,against another ship […]
(b) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction
of any State […]”
As far as the suppression of piracy is concerned, it has customarily been recognized and codified that those on board a pirate vessel may be arrested by the seizing vessel. These individuals may be subsequently tried by any State and are subject to penalties imposed by that State’s laws (article 105 LOSC). 28 Throughout the past several hundred years, the legitimacy of universal jurisdiction over piracy has been recognized by jurists and scholars of every major maritime nation. 29 [/INDENT] Emphasis added. So if you kill for the purposes of plunder on the high seas in an unregistered ship, any state can try you.
There is a treaty which the USA is not a signatory to, which forbids someone renouncing citizenship if they don’t have another one acquired. You’ll probably be strongly encouraged, or outright refused unless you have acquired another one. You also have to do it outside the USA at an embassy.
Truth be told I remember researching this a time and there were a couple of cases where someone renounced and came slinking back a few later and seemingly they were reinstated because they got back into the USA.
I think the state department doesn’t publicize this because they don’t want a lot of political protest type renunciations, they see them as a pain the ass.
EDIT:The agents you deal with in citizen services in US embassies are US citizens and have wide latitude to approve or refuse whatever, with little recourse except going to the media or writing your congressperson etc.
Whether you can become a stateless person depends on what citizenship(s) you have to begin with. A great many citizenships cannot be renounced at all, and still others can be renounced only in circumstances where another citizenship is acquired, or with the agreement of the government concerned, or whatever.
But, yes, there are some stateless people, who are either born in that condition or have acquired it, almost always involuntarily. There is a multilateral treaty, the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, under which state who are party to the Convention can issue travel documents to stateless persons, which other state parties will recognise (and which non-party states may or may not recognise). But not all states are party to the Convention - the US is not - and in any event it doesn’t apply to all stateless persons
Some examples of how people are born or become truly stateless:
They are an ethnic minority in a country that has become independent, and now generally recognises only members of the dominant ethnicity as nationals, while the rump state only recognises those who are living within its new borders (eg, Russians in Kazakhstan);
They are an ethnic minority in a country that considers people of that minority to be illegal immigrants, no matter how long their family has been there (the Bidoon in Kuwait, Nepalese in Bhutan);
They are Palestinian, and have not been naturalised by any other state;
They are born in a country that doesn’t recognise the principle of jus soli, to parents who are nationals of a country that doesn’t recognise the principle of jus sanguinis;
Some combination of the above, e.g., father is Palestinian; mother is from a country where nationality can’t be passed on by the mother; baby is born in a country which considers the child’s nationality to derive from the parents’ (I had an actual case like this recently).
I think you can be stateless in Svalbard. There is no immigration formality, anyone without papers can just go there and live, there is a modern community there to live in, but the cost of living is very high, with employment difficult to obtain. As long as you stay there, you can be stateless. Although Norwegian territory, you would not have any claim to Norwegian nationality, no matter how long you stay there, and would need a passport to enter Norway proper.
As has been noted by Measure for Measure, piracy is a case of undisputed, i.e. generally acknowledged, universal jurisdiction (as a side note for those interested in the history of international law, for a long time it was the only undisputed case of universal jurisdiction. More recently, the doctrine evolved that universal jurisdiction also applies to crimes against humanity and genocide, but that does not have the centuries-old tradition as that of universal jurisdiction for piracy). This means, in effect, that any country in the world, including landlocked states, has jurisdiction to prosecute, try, and punish pirates if it wants to do so. It is a choice of the state, however; the state may decide not to exercise jurisdiction.
The international law of outer space is not as well established as the law of the sea. There is a body called space law, but for obvious reasons it does not have a tradition as long as that of the law of the sea, which was formed in its essential building blocks centuries ago. And since most of international law is based on custom, and customary law tends to evolve slowly, much is uncertain in this regard. I would like to note, however, that even a privately owned spacecraft would most likely have the equivalent of a flag state under the law of the seas.
That’s a slightly misleading way to phrase it, I think. It’s probably more the other way round: You can stay there even if and while you are stateless. A stateless person’s status doesn’t change simply as a result of moving around (which is also the reason why a statement such as “You can be a stateless person in Svalbard” is misleading). A stateless person will remain stateless until some state grants them citizenship, which is in the sole discretion of the state; there is no principle in international law deciding which nationality a person has, it’s solely a matter of national law to decide whether and to which person nationality is granted. Stateless people are, consequently, either people who chose to be stateless and became so by renouncing their previous nationality (something Albert Einstein did at some stage in his life, for instance), or - and this is the more frequent case, applying to many Palestinian people, for instance - people who do not meet any country’s requirements for nationality and were therefore born stateless. But if you are stateless, you can travel around as much as you want to (providing countries admit you, of course) without changing status.
I figured as much regarding that part : just to perform a spacecraft launch, the private company has to get approval from the relevant authorities in the country they are launching from. The exact ownership might get a little tricky if the spacecraft were launching from a launch platform in the sea near the equator and were built with components from dozens of countries, however. Anyways, if spacecraft from 10 different countries converged on an asteroid, and all of the crew renounced their citzenships, and they mined the asteroid and produced a new spacecraft, to what country would the new spacecraft be registered?
Established case law appears to be silent on this issue, I’m afraid, so it would be up to future international law pundits to develop the law further when the question arises. I’d like to point out, however, that the “all of the crew renounced their citzenships” part of your hypothetical scenario is irrelevant: The nationality of the crew members has no bearing on the nationality of the vessel, as established by the flag that it flies.
Speaking of case law: Those of you who want to read more about the landmark decision on jurisdiction on the high seas may be interested in taking a look at the Lotus case.