The sea at the crossroad: the legal repercussions of the superposition of legal regimes on the effectivity of the police at sea – MERCRO

The proposal arose from the European maritime current events. The sea indeed became for Europe a major security issue. A large number of legal studies concentrated on the migratory phenomena, the rise of the criminality at sea or the environmental challenges. However, these studies remain for the main part sectorial and do not seize the maritime criminal phenomenon in its entirety. Yet to protect at best Europe’s security, the compartmentalized approach developed by the research in international and European law is unsatisfactory. The present project suggests to decompartmentalise the approaches and study all the rules applicable to criminal activities at sea in order to preserve the efficiency of the police at sea.

The questions of criminality (maritime terrorism, piracy, illicit fishing, migrants smuggling, drug trafficking, etc.) on one hand and the question of the fundamental rights in the framework of police activities at sea on the other hand, form the substratum of the study. It then fits perfectly in the framework of the challenge which recovers the clarification of the sovereign missions regarding security and risk management, here essentially human and environmental. The results of the Project will be the regularly published within international, maritime or European law Journals, in particular following the research realized by the PhD student and the Post-doc recruited by the project.

These periodic publications will be also completed by at least two collective publications of the members of the research team. These publications are scientific publications in the field of the legal science and will have the widest distribution in particular thanks to their bilingual character, in French and in English. Besides, the project has for ambition to be proactive and to be a source of proposals by suggesting concrete and operational solutions to be implemented in public policies at the national level (Ministries of the Interior, the Defense and the Foreign Affairs) as well as at the European level (European Commission in particular). Contacts with these institutions are in the course of establishment. They will be operational for January, 2018.

The coordinator will lean on a scientific team of high quality. Scientific links were established during the project MARSAFENET financed by the European Commission (COST action(share)) supervised by Professor Gemma ANDREONE. The project thus leans on scientific cooperations already functioning and solid. It includes nevertheless new members where needed.

The results of the project will have fallouts in the field of the basic research in law, and more exactly in international and European law. However, these results do not limit themselves to the theoretical area, even if it remains fundamental for the international influence of our Universities. Indeed, the first objective of the study is to allow practical effects on the effectiveness of the naval police and thus, by consequences on the European security.