By: Andy Wong Ming JunPhoto from Lloyd’s List IntelligenceIn recent months, the number of Iranian-flagged oil tankers as well as “zombie” ships sailing under the name and flag state of long-scrapped vessels through the Singapore Strait has increased markedly. Low-laden with crude oil sailing east to China, riding high sailing empty west, the increased sailings are a clear sign of Tehran’s financial precarity as it faces economic ruin following decades of state mismanagement and stiffened western sanctions. China is more than happy to buy up massively cut-priced Iranian crude oil to fill its national reserve tanks, accounting for 90 percent of Iranian oil exports over the past two years, carried on one fifth of global crude tanker volumes, sanctioned or otherwise. These sanctioned Iranian and assortment of zombie tankers have passed unmolested by Singapore’s coast guard or naval patrol ships as they sail through the Strait, winding between the island-state and Indonesian territorial waters to the south. The Strait is fast becoming a focal point in efforts to police the global dark fleet, with the channel’s strategic location connecting Europe and the Middle East to East Asia raising questions over the island-state’s will in enforcing sanctions it signed up to either in line with US-led Western efforts or as part of UN-mandated global sanctions. Lloyd’s List Intelligence, the famed maritime data and intelligence company, identified 27 such vessels transiting the Strait in December, with another 130 in the nearby Riau Archipelago. In a written parliamentary response earlier this month, Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow stated that Singapore is fully applying UN Security Council resolutions and will not tolerate illegal or deceptive activities by shadow fleet vessels which may be denied entry or detained if caught within Singaporean territorial waters. The answer to the lack of seizure lies within freedom of navigation rights enshrined within the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of waterways used for international navigation such as the Malacca and Singapore Straits. Under UNCLOS, such Straits Used for International Navigation automatically establish the right of “transit passage” for ships and aircraft and explicitly forbids bordering states to such waterways from unilaterally hindering or suspending passage. Transit passage rights through waterways used for international navigation are one of the most sensitive examples of the universal freedom of navigation enshrined within UNCLOS. Violation of transit passage rights through international navigation waterways is considered by many sovereign states to be a casus belli for war. This extremely thin international waterway outside of the 22.2 nautical mile territorial waters definition set out within UNCLOS makes up the actual “Singapore Strait” used for international navigation. It includes the deepwater Philips Channel between Singapore’s southeast coast and Indonesia’s Riau Islands which at its narrowest is a mere 2.8 km. (1.5 nautical miles).Ship spottingRemy Osman, a British national, has turned an impromptu pastime of ship spotting from his quarantine hotel window during the Covid-19 pandemic into a full-blown Instagram page “SG Shipspotting” specializing in documenting the passage of these oil tankers and cargo ships that are a part of the global dark tanker fleet. Using nothing more than his smartphone camera and keeping an eye on open-source live marine traffic data online, Osman tracks and visually identifies them, carrying crude or natural gas from Russia and Iran eastwards to keep the Chinese economy fueled and running. Osman’s early dark-fleet tanker-spotting primarily documented vessels sailing under flags of convenience but individually sanctioned for their known role in transporting sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. He can easily track dark fleet tankers easily on live marine traffic data websites before visually spotting and confirming them, which is entirely because the vessels must switch on their Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) as they sail through one of the world’s busiest and most congested international waterways. The tankers and their cargo might be sanctioned, their voyage might be deemed illegal under international law, but their crews are not reckless to risk colliding with other ships in the Singapore Strait. This is as much for their own safety as well as denying Singapore or Indonesia any justification to hinder their passage or interdict them through boarding actions. Photo from BloombergA perennial problem with global documentation and policing lies in the fleet’s ability to simply disappear off live tracking by turning off their AIS transponders, giving them a degree of stealth and windows of opportunity for evading non-visual tracking scrutiny. In this sense, Singapore is in an ideal position to monitor such large vessels which have no real alternative route to sail between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The government claims it is using every available tool within existing UNCLOS legal frameworks and constraints like providing navigational information and reporting detected environmental pollution caused by such vessels to their respective flag states, short of kinetic boarding actions, and is calling for greater global cooperation to help tackle the issue. Yet this shrugging of shoulders, citing international legal constraints on how sovereign states can police anything on the high seas, is not entirely true. More than a few of the tankers Osman has documented should have long ago been scrapped. Not doing so is a violation of UNCLOS Article 92, which specifically states that flag changes can’t occur without a real transfer of ownership or change in registry.Hanging a flag on the stern or painting a different name on the hull doesn’t automatically confer legitimate state-registered identity for a ship, which makes zombie tankers sailing under fraudulent identities liable under international law to detention by any country with the ability and political will to do so. Indeed, the unprecedented pursuit and capture of the Guyana-flagged oil tanker Bella 1 in mid-January by US maritime forces saw the ship try to change its name and national identity on the fly to become the Russian-flagged Marinera. Despite Russia’s claim of dispatching a naval warship and allegedly even a submarine to escort Bella 1, the US seized her nonetheless and highlighted the reality of credible legal power and presence on the high seas juxtaposed by the woolly principled ideals enshrined in international law.The story of a private individual curating a social media page using nothing more than a smartphone camera and publicly available online vessel databases to document a constant stream of the global dark fleet sailing past Singapore is not just an illustration of how commoditized surveillance tools have become in the world today. It is also an illustration of the ineffectiveness of laws and sanctions regimes, as the extent of their practicable enforcement shows, or indeed the will to act.