Not surprisingly, Somali pirates have acquired sophisticated weapons and tracking devices, upgraded their intelligence network, and their attacks are now being mounted farther and farther out on the High Seas—as far as 1,200 nautical miles offshore.

Australia’s inspector of transport security Mick Palmer, who was also attending Interpol’s 78^th general assembly in Singapore, said, “There’s lot of money to be made from hijacking. But the pirates themselves, many of whom are only teenagers from poor and disadvantaged background, are getting very little of that money. Ordinary Somali pirates, he pointed out, only get a small portion— about 10,000 dollars—of the average two million dollars ransom for each hijacking, suggesting that organised crime groups (including foreigners) get the bulk of the money. Interpol, the France-based global police organisation, is trying to help the Somali police with technical expertise, including “building a pirates’ database and fingerprinting suspects.”

But as Somali and international law enforcement agencies are quickly beginning to realise, merely following up the ransom money trail or even capturing some pirates in the very act of piracy is not enough of a deterrent. Nor is it likely to reduce their menace swiftly spreading across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

And that, primarily because when it comes to the prosecution of these criminals, there exists no legally binding international treaty dealing with such transnational crimes. And that certainly raises some complex questions: Who prosecutes the pirates captured on the High Seas? Where should the trial be held? Which due process of law should first be applied and then followed universally? Which national/international judicial authority should adjudicate? As yet, there are no answers.

Also, compounding the problem is the fact that there is no effective central government in control in the Somali capital Mogadishu. The dreaded al-Shabab extremist group, closely linked to Al Qaeda, exercises much influence in parts of Mogadishu itself and in southern Somalia and remains committed to overthrow the UN-backed transitional government. Political anarchy, rampant corruption, an impoverished economy and crippling poverty are additional instigating factors fuelling the explosion of piracy in this troubled Horn of Africa nation.

The destabilising effect after Somali warlords overthrew the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, led to an ever-increasing spate of pirate attacks. And even an international armada of warships now patrolling the dangerous waters off Somalia, has failed to clampdown on the pirates. Last year, more than 40 ships were attacked and captured by pirates and with ransoms, reportedly ranging from $ 500,000 to $ 2 million, the latter made quite a fortune. This year 34 ships have already been hijacked so far by Somali pirates, compared to 49 in all of 2008.

To make matters worse, Somalia’s police chief Abdi Hassan Awaleh admitted during the Interpol conference that there has been no noticeable progress in the fight against piracy, despite increased naval patrols in the region.

Lieutenant Nathan Christensen of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, underlining the impossibility of protecting shipping traffic spread over more than a million square miles, has been quoted as saying: “Piracy will continue to be a problem where there remains no support for law or government on land.”

But the ‘impossibility’ of mounting an effective counter-piracy mission is no excuse for either the international community in general, or those nations affected more directly in particular, to do nothing and continue to be held hostage by an armed band of pirates on the high seas. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) took the initiative of setting up the specialised IMB Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) in 1992 in Kuala Lumpur. The Centre, funded by voluntary contributions, works closely with various governments and law enforcement agencies. But it lacks any investigating or prosecuting powers. It’s high time the PRC was provided a fixed budget by willing donor nations so that it functions still more efficiently.

Similarly, the Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a multinational coalition naval task force with logistics facilities at Djibouti is involved in maritime security operations and patrols the Horn of Africa region. But it is quite clear that despite it’s several successes in anti-piracy operations—the situation actually cannot be resolved solely by any such military option.

The two critical questions thus are: What more needs to be done? Who will do it? One obvious choice would be to start with a close re-scrutiny of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in a concerted bid to increase its efficacy. For instance, the assumption that individual states will police and patrol their own territorial waters has proved to be rather fallacious in the case of a failed state such as Somalia. So what next? This law must surely be suitably amended.

After all, the Law of the Sea also empowers “all countries” to seize and prosecute those involved in pirate acts on the high seas. But what happens when some elements of the state apparatus itself choose to either willingly connive or brazenly condone such criminal activity?

They should be held accountable under a revised international Law of the Sea and prosecuted accordingly. The sooner that such a mechanism is put in place, the better.

Anand Sagar is Khaleej Times’ Foreign Editor, Professor Emeritus of the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bangalore, and former Visiting Fellow, University of Oxford. He can be reached at anandsagar@khaleejtimes.com