The Charge of Piracy in the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

Among the numerous problems of an international interest which havebeen raised by the Spanish war, there is one which has attracted the attention of jurists to a lesser degree than certain others, such as the question of the recognition of belligerency, or that of non-intervention. Yet this problem is not without interest from a strictly juridical point of view, for it poses an important question of terminology and, at the same time, permits the clarification of a notion which, although simple, clear and formerly well understood, has been so obscured by erroneous thought that it is difficult to realize that its actual meaning seems to have been lost by our contemporaries. The problem to which we refer is that of piracy, and it is as a result of the misunderstanding and distortion of this term that the civil war in Spain has first come to be inscribed in the annals of maritime warfare.