LOSFARE · Law of the Sea and Hybrid Warfare

Law of the Sea and Hybrid Warfare

The objective of LOSFARE is to examine the legitimacy of naval hybrid warfare by identifying the limitations under the law of the sea to the jurisdiction of States in imposing their political influence on other States. To reach this aim, LOSFARE scrutinises State practice and examines whether it has affected the state of the law. This project verifies if State practice demonstrates the emergence of a new concept of hybrid naval warfare which should be distinguished from the traditional phenomena of naval warfare and law enforcement. LOSFARE also examines if the concept of hybrid warfare is useful for assessing the (il)legality of an aggressor’s actions in the maritime domain. LOSFARE focuses on the practice of States in imposing navigational restrictions on foreign ships and aircraft in densely navigated maritime regions in the context of hybrid warfare. Foreign ships that were navigating through important chokepoints of maritime commerce have recently been repeatedly subjected to the use of force or coercion by the coastal State of the relevant strait. Problems in the classification of naval incidents between peacetime law enforcement and humanitarian law paradigms underline many contemporary inter-State naval conflicts, e.g., the Kerch Strait incident, attacks against ships in the ‘shadow war’ between Iran and Israel, and the ‘spillover’ of the Yemeni armed conflict in the Red Sea as manifested by attacks against foreign ships passing through that important waterway. In the Baltic Sea region, there have been repeated incursions of suspected Russian submarines into the territorial seas of Sweden and Finland and multiple violations of Russia’s neighboring States’ airspace by Russia’s military aircraft. These are all instances that serve as examples of hybrid warfare. Furthermore, sabotage against submarine cables and pipelines is one of the main sources of grey zone conflicts. Numerous maritime incidents in the past couple of years have raised questions about the legal resilience of critical energy or telecommunications infrastructure in the context of hybrid warfare. These problems are best exemplified by the Nord Stream explosions of September 2022 and the damaging of the submarine gas pipeline and cable of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (hereafter NATO) Member States Estonia and Finland in 2023. In this context, one of the topics addressed in this project is how hybrid naval warfare impacts the safety of objects of critical offshore infrastructure and how to increase their legal resilience? The project also focuses on the interdiction of ships suspected of being involved in sabotage against critical offshore infrastructure outside the limits of the territorial sea.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union