Troubled Sea Off the Coast of West and Central Africa: Insights into the Gulf of Guinea’s Upsurge in Maritime (in) Security and its Impact on Human Rights and the Rule of Law

In this article, I review the upsurge in maritime (in) security in the Gulf of Guinea and its impact on human rights and the rule of law. For the past decade, the area has become a zone of recurrent naval threats for the shipping industry owing to repeated incidents of piracy, armed robbery against ships, kidnapping and transnational organised crime activities. Meanwhile, there has been an inflation of trans-border, intraregional and interregional cooperation agreements to tackle this issue. Despite such agreements, recent statistics confirm that the situation has not improved. The Gulf of Guinea, a strategic region in the maritime environment, has now become the world’s most dangerous area in terms of illicit maritime activities and human rights violations. This complexity between the surge of insecurity on the sea off the coast of West and Central Africa and the initiatives to remedy this phenomenon is the core of my analysis.