Hot Pursuit and the Exercise of Enforcement Jurisdiction beyond the EEZ

Abstract

Abstract This Chapter considers the enforcement of coastal State fisheries laws and regulations beyond the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) following a hot pursuit. While the general framework for hot pursuit established in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is clear, its substantive content and operation—particularly in situations that do not fall neatly within the black and white terms of the framework—is less clear. This Chapter considers the key challenges to this framework, and the extent to which—and the ways in which—coastal States have implemented, developed, or departed from it in practice, focusing in particular on the domestic legal basis for conducting hot pursuit, the use of technology in the conduct of hot pursuit, and cooperative approaches to hot pursuit. While recognizing that the hot pursuit doctrine must strike an appropriate balance between the sovereign rights of the coastal State to enforce its laws and the exclusive jurisdiction of the flag State over its vessels on the high seas, the Chapter argues that there is also a broader community interest to be balanced on both sides of this equation: to ensure the effective conservation and management of living resources, and preserve the freedom of navigation on the high seas. This is reflected in the Chapter’s examination of practice, which reveals that States have adopted and implemented a functional, contemporary approach to hot pursuit within the framework of the existing doctrine, which itself has proved to be at once flexible and remarkably enduring.