Calming troubled waters

In mid-June ASPI's Peter Jennings chaired an international conference in Perth aimed at developing responses to piracy and related crimes at sea. The meeting was sponsored by the DFAT and Defence. This Special Report provides a summary of the deliberations as well as some very useful background papers by Dr Sam Bateman. Australia has been making an important contribution to strengthening regional cooperation on counter-piracy. Apart from the regular deployment of a Royal Australian Navy major fleet unit to operations in the Gulf which include counter-piracy work, Australia has provided significant funding to the United Nations to strengthen anti-piracy legal frameworks in a number of Indian Ocean region countries. The recent Perth conference shows that there is a lot of value in identifying global lessons by pooling experiences from separate regional contexts.