The tanker TALARA, flying the flag of the Marshall Islands, with a deadweight tonnage of 77,378 thousand tons, a length of 228 meters, a beam of 32 meters, and 21 crew members on board, loaded at the United Arab Emirates terminal in Sharjah and set sail for Singapore with a cargo of diesel. The vessel was stopped and “arrested” by the Iranian revolutionary guard 20 miles from Khor Fakkhan (Sharjah), in international waters, alleging that it was carrying “unauthorized cargo,” and was escorted to Iranian waters in the Khuran Strait (Iranian waters of the Strait of Hormuz). That is all.
These events occurred on Saturday, November 15, and it was on Wednesday the 19th that it was finally released, “once the documentation was clarified.” It should be emphasized that the vessel was detained in international waters, violating the law of the sea (United Nations International Convention on the Law of the Sea), which delimits the ‘territorial sea’ to 12 miles.
The US Central Command for the defense of friendly waters of 20 nations in the Middle East, Central and South Asia (Centcom) has stated that the boarding and capture of the TALARA is an obvious “violation of international maritime law”.
And it is possible that this praiseworthy position of the US Department of Defense contradicts its stance of attacking and destroying what it declares as ‘drug boats’, which it considers terrorists that threaten the security of the United States, with no other evidence than the very declaration that the aforementioned Department of Defense makes about the vessels it destroys with crew on board in Caribbean waters.
Many high-level politicians, both in Europe and on other continents, express their concern about the increasing slide of international relations into a model where they are being regulated by the use of force instead of maintaining the criterion upheld by the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and other politicians, about the necessary continuity of international relations based on rules.
The rule is the International Convention on the Law of the Sea, the force is used by those who violate it. Where are we heading?
