In the column How do I go about starting my own country?, Cecil writes:
How does this work? Let’s say my boat is registered with such a country (I understand Panama used to be all the rage in this regard, but that may have changed). If I sail out to international waters, am I entirely beyond the reach of the authorities? If you get drunk and go aboard my boat, can I take you out to sea and kill you without fear of repercussions?
Someone’s got a wild weekend planned.
If you are in international waters and doing something perceived as harmful to the US, the Coast Guard might pay you a visit. E.g., shipping drugs towards the US. As a general rule, they will try to get permission of the appropriate country. Hence your Liberian/Panamanian flag will hardly slow down the process. They certainly aren’t going to object. There are a few laws of the sea about safety and such that you must obey or risk getting taken in if a nearby country thinks it’s going to harm them. But they are generally quite weak.
If you kill a US citizen anywhere, the US will try to have you extradited for trial if the local authorities don’t appear to be suitably handling things. An extradition from Cuba is hard. An “extradition” from a no-name boat in the sea is easy. Note that your (the murderer’s) country of citizenship (if different) will also have an interest in the case.
There is also the problem that there might be people with boats and guns who see your little nation and decide they want it for themselves. Not everybody out there is operating by the same rules as the US Coast Guard.
Someone told me that a British citizen had purchased an off-shore oil platform (it had run dry) off the coast of Britain and this person planned on conducting illicit money transfers, (maybe even rebroadcasting events and descriptions of Major League Baseball games WITHOUT permission). Okay, I was clowning around on that last part.
Anyway, the platform is outside of British Territorial Waters, and so this person considers himself to be free of any laws of any country.
(Still, this seems like the Pirate Radio story of the 1960’s.)
To me it seems the big problem would be (and Cecil touched upon this), would be defense. What if someone just decided to comandeer that platform? The guy couldn’t rely on Britain for help because 1) he has declared himself a citizen of whatever he wants to call the oil platform and 2) He is no longer within the bounds of British waters and all economic, governmental, etc ties have been severed. I imagine this problem could severely put a damper on anyone starting their own country.
I guess with the Information Age well underway, this guy must have thought that he could do all the electronic money laundering he wanted to.
Here’s the current website for The Principality of Sealand. It was actually a sea fort which had been built by the British during WWII and later abandoned. If you read the history section, there was once an attempt to take Sealand by force, which was eventually unsuccessful.
I seem to remember previous discussions of Sealand and whether it actually qualifies as a sovereign nation on SDMB.
ftg:
Would the US have jurisdiction over something that happened in another country?
<< Would the US have jurisdiction over something that happened in another country? >>
The best jurisdiction there is: might makes right.
There’s no international body to handle that sort of situation; the US would request extradiction. If the nation disagrees (which has happened with some “real” nations and allies, because the US state requesting the extradiction has a death penalty, for instance), there’s not much the US can do in terms of “jurisdiction.” If the US feels strongly about it, they can take actions against the country, ranging from political (withdrawing an ambassador, say) or economic (like cutting US aid to that country), or more dramatic (declaring the country hostile and pulling out all US personnel and business, invasion, etc.) opposing that nation’s next request for aid.)
We got the big guns, so if you’re little two-bit nation refused to comply with a US request, and if the US govt cared, they would just blast the hell out of you. We don’t need no steenkin’ UN or courts. Witness Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
Has the US ever requested extradition from a country for a crime that happened in that country? Has any country?
Well, it’s possible that the U.S. could just refuse to acknowledge your independence. If you’re nominally a U.S. citizen, they might just ignore the registry of your boat. Hey, the boat may be a foreign registry, but that doesn’t mean the people on it are foreigners.
Ryan: Dunno whether this counts as extradition, but the Drug Enforcement Agency has certainly cooperated with Mexican police in arresting Mexicans and dragging them north of the border (which they had never crossed before) to prosecute them.