The Crew Follows the Hull: Seafarers’ Protection in Armed Conflict and Maritime Security Operations

Abstract

Merchant seafarers are civilians whose legal protection in armed conflict is not held personally but derived from the ship beneath them. This article names that arrangement hull-derived protection and identifies the unargued assumption on which it rests: the congruence premise, according to which flag, ownership, cargo, control and crew nationality point in the same direction, so that a judgement about a vessel is a serviceable proxy for a judgement about the persons aboard it. Congruence has failed. Roughly three-quarters of world tonnage flies a flag other than that of beneficial ownership, crews are assembled across a dozen labour-supplying states, and belligerents in the Red Sea, the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf now select targets by imputed political association — port-call history, fleet structure, sanctioned cargo, destination — rather than by flag. The proxy has come loose from the thing it stood for. The article then shows why no adjacent regime repairs the defect, tracing what is termed here the deferral chain: humanitarian law defers to the platform, the law of the sea defers to the flag State, labour law defers to the shipowner, and maritime security operations defer to the trade interest, leaving no residual duty-holder. Against this, the article defends a narrow reconstruction. Platform-based targeting may remain the rule for the liability of the vessel; it cannot govern four personal entitlements of the crew — proportionality accounting, precautions and warning, detention status, and rescue with repatriation. The 2026 evacuation framework for the Strait of Hormuz is read as the first institutional expression of that decoupling.