Christian Bueger


UNODC Expert Meeting in Mauritius

From the 14th to 18th of October the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Global Maritime Crime Programme (GMCP) is hosting its Legal Expert Network meeting in Mauritius. Part of the meeting is to review the forthcoming 3rd edition of Maritime Crime: A Manual for Criminal Justice Practitioners. This concerns in particular new chapters on ship rider provisions, on submarine cable protection as well as stateless vessels.

At the meeting I will be leading a brainstorming exercise on Transnational Maritime Environmental Crime drawing on work conducted in the Safeseas network new project Transnational Organised Crime at Sea (TOCAS). Arguing for distinguishing between three “blue crimes” (crimes against mobility, criminal flows, and environmental crime), I discuss illicit waste trade, pollution crimes, illegal extraction, and other damages to the marine environment and the respective legal regimes addressing these. Part of the discussion will be how to deal with the complexity of the environmental crime at sea regimes.


UNODC training week in Stellenbosch

From the 24th to 27th of September I will be attending the training week of UNODC’s Global Maritime Crime Programme (GMCP), held in Stellenbosch, South Africa. At the event I will deliver two training sessions. The first one looks at Environmental Crime at Sea, and is largely a scoping exercise, asking how we should conceptualise environmental crimes in the context of ocean governance and the anthroprocene. The second session focuses on Maritime Security Governance drawing on the SafeSeas Best Practice Toolkit and the governance model presented there as well as the relevance of maritime security strategy. I will also chair a public roundtable jointly organised with SIGLA. The roundtable is titled “Caught between AIMS-2050 and Lomé: Why do African states still not care about the seas and oceans?”. It features a range of South Africa based maritime security experts and investigates the reasons for the lack of attention in African states for ocean governance and maritime security.