Editing Pirates of the Baltic Sea (section)

===The Hanseatic Convention===

Baltic Sea does not have actual international waters. It used to be divided into territorial waters of the Baltic Sea states and their exclusive economic zones, with the EEZ of one state bordering that of another. In exclusive economic zones, there are restrictions on national jurisdiction and sovereignty, but the state still has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources. The main difference to international waters is that ships sailing in the latter are generally under the jurisdiction of the flag state. However, when a ship is involved in certain criminal acts, such as piracy, any nation can exercise jurisdiction under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction.

With the rise of corporate power and the desire of megacorporations to free themselves from government oversight, the corporations operating in the Baltic Sea area started to resent the closed nature of the Sea, where they had to conform to the various laws and regulations of the Baltic Sea states. They felt especially chafed by the regulations that threatened them with costs. After much lobbying about the benefits of free trade and private treaties with various states, the megacorporations managed to muscle through the Hanseatic Convention, named after the Hanseatic League, a trade group that operated in the region from thirteenth century to seventeenth. According to the Convention, most of the area of the former exclusive economic zones were formed into a new Corporate Economic Zone. This meant that although the seabed remained in control of the states, the surface waters were a corporate-controlled zone where the sovereign states had no universal jurisdiction, effectively placing all corporate shipping outside the jurisdiction of the states until they entered the territorial waters. And since the corporations had private treaties with various states, in many cases this allowed them to do as they please.

In a textbook example of corporate short-sightedness, this brought into being something the Baltic Sea had not experienced in centuries – piracy. With no universal jurisdiction, the navies operating in the Baltic Sea had no authority to apprehend vessels beyond their territorial waters. Armed vessels started to prey on the shipping, some of them individual and others belonging to various groups. The pirate vessels operated from within the territorial waters of one state or another, some in secret and others semi-openly, when the sovereign states for one reason or another looked the other way as long as their own territorial waters weren’t violated.

The corporations swiftly amended the Hanseatic Convention to give the ships sailing in the Corporate Economic Zone the right to act against piracy. But the damage was done. The amendment had mixed responses. Many states felt that the corporations were shifting the costs to them while keeping the benefits. Nearly all navies respond swiftly to attacks on civilian or passenger vessels, but some come to the aid of corporate ships much slower or not at all. Others will ruthlessly pursue any ships engaging in acts of piracy.

The piracy continues to be a problem, and corporate vessels now routinely carry security teams on board, and are either themselves armed or have armed escorts, either corporate owned or mercenary vessels. To add to the mix, rival corporations sometimes hire privateers to harass the shipping of each other, and corporate hired pirate hunters prowl the waters where the navies are lax to protect the corporations.