The sea is a public area over which no one nation holds jurisdiction under international law as stated in The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. While this law generally protects against the exploitation of the sea by all nations, this tragedy of the commons means that in instances when a boat full of asylum seekers is “lost at sea,” there is generally a very minimal effort made to recover that boat as at the time of the boat’s sinking, the boat was not in the jurisdiction of any one nation. Such a position on the issue means that there are several boats a year that go missing and unreported. Crossings are not always undertaken in large boats capable of transporting hundreds of people, but are also common in smaller boats, which are at greater risk of being damaged by weather while out at sea. Establishing a system to …show more content…
In many situations, those who arrive successfully are detained for long periods of time. There is often great animosity towards refugees among native people, often prompting government action to attempt to deter the influx of asylum seekers over international boarders. International and European human rights standards set clear limitations on what is considered permissible when detaining new arrivals at their boarders. All too frequently states defy guidelines, and detain asylum seekers for inordinately long periods of time, causing an obvious and adherent breach of human rights. What’s more alarming is that children have also been known to be detained without their parents, either because they made the crossing alone, or because they were separated in the process of arrival sorting. In either case, no human, but especially not a child, should be detained without legitimate reason. Furthermore, detention is not an effective deterrent against immigration, as in very few cases are asylum seekers even aware of the fact that they face