Human Right are certainly a progress compared to middle age witch tortures and stalinistic despotic abuses.
But as all dogmas, maybe they should be questioned. Setting pirates free after expensive capture, does that not encourage piracy and create human suffering? Potential victims of the next attack of the same pirates? Victims of other pirates who join the profession, because they see that their biggest risk is spending a day on a war ship, getting fed and then sent back home? Everyone in the world who pays higher cost for higher insurance premiums due to piracy?
And if they get caught and actually sent to court? Due process means that a dozen witnesses get flown in from all over the world to their court date? If they don’t come, the criminals go free. What about the cost, financially, and simply loss of time for spending a week in Kenia to go to a hot court? Not to talk about the cost of locking criminals away for 10 years. Would not an investment in hospitals and schools be more humane then wasting HUGE amounts on jails?
I understand that these topics are complex, I don’t suggest easy solutions. But I am against unquestionable dogmas that can cause unsolvable problems.
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/ delves further into similar issues
The pirates’ release underscores the difficulties navies have in fighting rampant piracy off the coast of lawless Somalia. Most of the time foreign navies simply disarm and release the pirates they catch due to legal complications and logistical difficulties in transporting pirates and witnesses to court.
Pirates have attacked more than 80 boats this year alone, four times the number assaulted in 2003, according to the Kuala Lumpur-based International Maritime Bureau. They now hold at least 18 ships — including a Belgian tanker seized Saturday with 10 crew aboard — and over 310 crew hostage, according to an Associated Press count.
From http://latestnewsworldwide.blogspot.com/2009/04/nato-ships-helicopters-hunt-down-7.html
