Subsea infrastructure needs Unclos protection from attack by ships
IN 1847, a young German engineer by the name of Carl Wilhelm Siemens wondered if telegraph cables would work even when submerged.
He hooked up a gutta percha-insulated link under the Rhine, connecting Deutz and Cologne, and secured proof of concept.
And if that surname sounds familiar, that is because Siemens went on to found the vast multinational conglomerate we know today.
A cable beneath the Channel followed in 1851 and in 1858, Britain’s Queen Victoria and US President James Buchanan exchanged the first transatlantic telegraphs.
Thus was born submarine infrastructure, which two centuries later is a vast — if curiously unsung — endeavour.
Shipping is deeply involved in making it happen, with whole classes of vessels dedicated to the specialism.
Boosted by the emergence of the internet, there are now 870,00 miles of subsea fibre optic telecoms cabling, with a further 750,000 miles planned.
Don’t tell Elon Musk, but satellites have barely made a dent. Cable networks still handle 95% of data transmission, facilitating trillions of dollars of financial transactions every single day.
All of this is before we get to the 20,000 miles of active submarine oil and gas pipelines, with five or six times as much in the offing, and the increasing use of energy link cables for cross-border electricity transmission.
There are no readily available estimates for the aggregate value of all this kit simply sitting on the seabed. But back-of-an-envelope maths suggests hundreds of billions of dollars as an absolute minimum.
Rational states of all political persuasions share a common interest in keeping everything running smoothly. Even the Taliban, the Myanmar junta and the Cuban Communist Party allow their citizens online some of the time.
But an assumption of rational behaviour is sadly not axiomatic. We can all think off countries who may regard their interests as best served by disruption.
Malignant non-state actors will also be aware of the potential for destruction. The consequences of disabling the internet for months on end would be just as crippling as flying planes into the World Trade Center.
As highlighted by the collapse of the Eagle S(IMO: 9329760) prosecution last week, ships are the most obvious means by which such malevolent designs could be realised.
Three officers from the now-sanctioned tanker were accused of cutting the Estlink2 energy cable between Finland and Estonia, after the vessel dragged anchor for 90km in the Baltic in December 2024.
It should be emphasised that the prosecution did not argue that they did so deliberately, charging them instead with negligence in windlass maintenance. Furthermore, the men denied wrongdoing and the trial did not establish otherwise.
However, the Helsinki District Court ruled that it simply lacked jurisdiction for an incident that occurred on a Cook Islands-flagged ship, even though the events unfolded in Finland’s exclusive economic zone.
The prosecutors have just launched an appeal. But earlier this week, Lloyd’s List asked two senior shipping lawyers about the wider implications of the outcome at first instance.
They believe that under the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, the conclusion was the only one the court could feasibly have reached and would be repeated in similar circumstances anywhere else. If so, it would be nothing short of a green light for those who wish us harm.
Their argument is that only the flag state has the capacity in law to initiate action in these situations. To date there is no indication that the Cook Islands will be taking this matter any further.
You don’t have to buy into the arguments of the International Transport Workers’ Federation to concede that when it comes to the bottom end of the flagging market, it’s the Wild West out there.
As any following the tactics of the shadow fleet* can see, the standards supposedly obtaining for some registries are not worth the pixels on which their websites are written.
Other ‘flags’ dispense with such bureaucratic formalities as winning authorisation from the governments they ostensibly represent. They are, in short, no-questions-asked cowboy outfits.
At best, these registries lack any enforcement reach whatsoever; given that some are clearly criminal enterprises themselves, they would have few qualms about the criminality of others.
The national register of a country hellbent on undermining western interests could even actively condone malfeasance, and do so with impunity.
Unclos was worded in 1982, before the rise of submarine infrastructure to its more recent economic prominence.
At the very least, there is an urgent need for a rewrite to bring it into line in the wake of the emergence of a new threat.
Doing so would require sustained diplomatic effort. Unclos was deliberately framed to ensure that changing its stipulations is easier said than done.
But given the way in which the 2004 International Ship and Port Facility Security code was rushed through in the wake of 9/11 — and yes, a lapse of just three years does count as ‘rushing through’ in this context — it should not be impossible.
As we have long argued, a crackdown on flagging abuses would be desirable on multiple grounds. Add another reason to the list.
Even these steps would not guarantee the safety of submarine infrastructure. Lack of legality scarcely represents a constraint for those determined to inflict damage on the fundamental arteries of a functioning planet.
But it would at least offer a minimal layer of legal protection that would be worth having. Cable links should not be weak links.
* Lloyd’s List defines a tanker as being part of the Shadow Fleet if it engages in one or more deceptive shipping practices indicating that it is involved in the facilitation of sanctioned oil cargoes from Iran, Russia or Venezuela. Or it is sanctioned for participation in sanctioned oil trades or is sanctioned for links to a company that is sanctioned for facilitating the export of sanctioned oil.
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