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Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

bbc.com

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Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#3
I saw this video from Chief MAKOi (who has an excellent youtube channel in general) about this situation a week ago. It seemed rather hopeless for him at the time considering that it was going on for four years already. I wonder if that video contributed to pressure to fix the situation, it does have almost a million views.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#5
post #2

I don't understand why he couldn't just get on another ship and leave forever. Worst case you just never go back to that shitty country right?

If your livelihood depends on shipping, being unable to return to Egypt likely represents a significant barrier to obtaining future employment. Also, he may just have been extradited back to Egypt by another government.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#8
It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.

If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable.

Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#9
Why would you write an article like this without a word describing the legal consequences of leaving the ship? What consequence would be worth four years of your life?

Edit: a more useful video linked below explains that the authorities confiscated his passport. That would make it difficult to leave. Though I'd probably try anyway after a year of that.

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